Friday 2 February 2007

The Island by Victoria Hislop

My neighbour, Gill, loaned me this book about a month ago but my reading is taking a back seat to my blogging so I've only managed a couple books this month.

This book is about Alexis who goes off to Greece, specifically Crete with a boyfriend (she doesn't really love) in search of her family's history. And as we all know, Greece has loads of history. Throw in beautiful women, jealous brothers (and morally bereft cousins), leprosy (of all things), and a World War and you must be able to create a good book. Well, exactly. Good is about all it gets. I got the feeling through the entire novel that it was written with the express purpose of selling the movie rights (or possibly even the straight to video rights). I can just imagine it being completely over acted with a panoramic views of the beautiful Greek beaches and mountains and closeups of dark-haired, dewy-eyed temperamental Greek buxom beauties (she actually uses that expression in the book).

Victoria Hislop is the wife of Ian Hislop, an British comedian I quite like. He does a programme called Have I Got News for You which is about the only British humour I get so it must clearly be good. I for some completely illogical reason thought that since I enjoyed the husband's sense of humour, I would enjoy his wife's novel. Wrong.

Once again, an OK read but I wish it had been lower down on the priority list because there are only about 50 million other books I'd rather have read first.

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