On the Island

 4 Stars
Tracey Garvis-Graves

When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's summer rental in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation; a working vacation on a tropical island trumps the library any day. T.J. Callahan has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and if having cancer wasn't bad enough, now he has to spend his first summer in remission with his family - and a stack of overdue assignments - instead of his friends. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Adrift in shark-infested waters, their life jackets keep them afloat until they make it to the shore of an uninhabited island. Now Anna and T.J. just want to survive and they must work together to obtain water, food, fire, and shelter. Their basic needs might be met but as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.'s cancer could return. As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man.

  I didn't think I was going to like the book, but once I started reading I couldn't stop. I picked it up in the morning and finished around 2 in the morning. I was thinking that his was going to be just another romance novel were the heroine falls in love with some hunky guy, but Tracey did a fantastic job in building the story. After the plane crash I thought things were going to be all hot, but Anna was a wonderful character that had morals and wanted to do nothing wrong. T.J. was also very mature being a teenager I thought he would have jumped Anna after they crashed her being beautiful, but he built a relationship and I loved that about them. I was cheering for them not to have to deal with so much hardship it truly broke my heart every time something happened to one of them I was so scared they weren't gonna make it out a live. I was yelling at the book at one point because I couldn't believe the last twist Tracey threw in the story (though I guess I should have seen it coming if I had thought about the dates). I loved the how it ended and to know that their love slowly grew and they over came everything that was thrown their way and able to have a happy ending.