A book from all the way back in 1954 that struck my heart red hot today as I trembled and shook, turning the pages in absolute fear, completing this read.
This book brought me to tears and it took me a while to bring myself back to reality. What starts out by being a rather playful narrative of kids lost on an island awaiting rescue takes a number of dark turns, and one of them struck awfully. The incidents escalated to their tremendously dark end, and the I felt myself breathe in panic alongside the characters as I ran, wept, hurt and hid in my fears. I wish the characters had been made more relatable through a scale of grayness instead of making them the very extremes of their traits, but that was a creative decision that still did work and hurt me enough to bring me to my knees internally as I begged for mercy from the pain that haunts the book through eerie events and troubling reality. I do agree with a number of other reviewers that some of the author’s decisions made it easier for me to extract myself from the pages, and it wasn’t as troubling or real as it could have been – but what it was by itself is quite a potent shock and I felt myself walking the world of Ralph and Jack as I turned the pages and finished the book in one sitting.
– Swathi Chandrasekaran
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Perplexed Potatoes 