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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Burrowing deep, 13 Oct 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Island of Lost Girls definitely has a thing about rabbits. And submarines - rabbits and submarines. And Peter Pan. Jennifer McMahon however works and reworks these recurring motifs throughout this intriguing and thoroughly readable little thriller, which is as much about coming to terms with the past as it is in solving the puzzle of a missing girl who has been abducted by a giant white rabbit.
Yep, that's right, a giant white rabbit. Now anyone who watches movies will know that giant rabbits are never the sign of anything good - think Donnie Darko, Sexy Beast, even Harvey - but even in literature they have certain connotations on account of Alice in Wonderland, and indeed, the use of rabbits here (and submarines, and Peter Pan) all have a lot to do with childhood and childhood secrets, deep dark metaphorical burrows where one can hide from those fears of a threatening adult world that we are not really ready or capable of dealing with.
What's great then about Island of Lost Girls is that it doesn't approach the investigation into the missing girl from the normal police procedural and rational gathering of evidence point of view. The novel is not specifically female oriented, but the main character Rhonda Farr nevertheless takes a very female approach, sensing undercurrents and trusting in her intuition - and though she might not always be right in her assumptions, through her mixing of impressions, her dreams of rabbits and submarines, and her obsessing over an incident in the past with her friends and a childhood sweetheart, Rhonda connects to the emotional truth more accurately than any attempt to make logical sense of it all.
Jennifer McMahon similarly runs with impressions - starting the novel even from a child's view of the world - while also finding a strong structure that successfully blends these unusual and disparate recurrent elements into something meaningful through the accumulation of character detail and the connections that she forges between the past and present. The case of one missing girl then becomes the case of several lost girls, Rhonda herself perhaps among them, searching to make some sense of the past, leaving her childhood behind and perhaps finding a way to move forward.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky, competently written and enjoyable mystery romp, 18 Oct 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
I couldn't stop reading this book and really enjoyed the twists and turns in the plot, which is deeply quirky and starts when our main character spots a child being abducted by somebody dressed in a white rabbit suit. Not realising what's happening, Rhonda fails to act - and of course feels incredibly guilty afterwards, and motivated to find out more and try to help. The incident and ensuing hunt for the missing girl also brings up odd childhood memories that Rhonda has never dealt with before (mostly about a childhood friend who disappeared) and which chime uncannily with some details of the the white rabbit abduction.
It is basically a really bizarre premise for a crime novel, yet one that does really work well. It is playful and funny at times as well as suspenseful and heartbreaking. Essentially, it is a fairly light and easy read but that doesn't mean it's without depth. The playful aspects of the writing and plot are weirdly suitable to a crime novel that revolves around children, past and present, and it certainly stands apart from other more run of the mill offerings. I would definitely read another novel by this author.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More rabbit than Sainsbury's, 24 Sep 2009
This is one of those books, where you read the first chapter, and it makes no sense at all. But if you re-read this chapter after you've finished the book, it all makes perfect sense, and you realise that there were a lot of clues here, and you should have paid more attention the first time you read it.
I did quite enjoy this book, although it seemed to take a long time to get going. There didn't seem to be much to hook the reader in and make them care about any on the characters. Rhonda herself is not fully realised, we don't get a particularly strong idea of her as a person, other than that she's slightly overweight and has a long-term crush on Peter. We don't know much more about her by the end of the book either, except that she had a very close friend who also went missing. She always seems to be the person who doesn't understand what is actually going on, and doesn't feel the need to ask.
Both the story of missing Ernestine in the present, and Lizzy from the past, mirror each other, as does the tale of the rabbit in both periods. Not quite sure about the significance of the submarines in both stories, unless it's connected with rabbit holes.
I felt that there was a better story hidden within this one somewhere. The author leads you down one track, only to introduce a twist which manages to change everything. Personally, I thought she'd have been better of keeping to the original story, as the twist seemed rather far fetched, and, I felt, deflated some of the tension that the author had built up. When the truth was revealed it became apparent that Rhonda, and by extension the reader, was the only person who had no idea what was going on during her childhood, and the missing child story seemed a bit pointless.
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