Publisher:
Electric
Monkey
Release
Date: 3rd
June 2013
Edition:
UK paperback,
review copy
Betrayal
and forbidden love, beneath a seething sun...
Grace
Delaney and her fellow dance students are en route to perform on a South
Pacific cruise ship when a freak storm hits and they find themselves stranded
on a seemingly deserted island.
With
the tropical heat rising, passions and tensions swell to breaking point. And
the island itself is quietly steaming with a terrible secret...
I’m a big fan of Siobhan Curham’s
first two novels and when I heard about this, I got extremely excited. Shipwrecked looked totally different to Dear Dyland and Finding Cherokee Brown and I knew I was in for a treat!
Being marooned on a deserted
island isn’t a unique idea and has been done many times brilliantly but I thought
Siobhan Curham may out an individual spin on it and I was right. I was really,
really hoping that there wouldn’t be any supernatural elements to the novel and
there were, kind of, but I actually think they made the novel stand apart. It wasn’t
a typical form of the supernatural, but an old, mythical, voodoo story that
gave me chills. It’s a shame we don’t see more of that in YA!
As I’ve come to expect from
Siobhan, she also tackled some serious issues in Shipwrecked. There was illness, social class, divorce, pressure to
have sex, betrayal and bullying. I loved that they weren’t in the foreground of
the story, apart from the bullying maybe, as that was present from the very
beginning, but instead these problems formed parts of Grace, Cruz, Jenna, Cariss,
Dan, The Flea, Belle and Todd. Siobhan really has a gift with making characters
multi-dimensional, relatable and sympathetic. Part of this also came in with
The Fle’s sexuality; it wasn’t part of the storyline, it just was. There was no
coming out, shock revelations or homophobia which I think is equally as
important as kids reading and questioning their sexuality also need to know
that they’ll be accepted and that their sexuality won’t define them.
With such a vivid cast of
characters comes strong feelings about them and I have to say that there were
very few of them that I liked in the beginning and that only changed slightly
by the end! Jenna, Cariss and Todd made me really angry. They’re the type of
people who make life miserable for others for seemingly no reason at all and
every time they threw a jibe at Grace, Cruz or Belle I wanted to give them a
smack. However, after their shock actions at the end of the book, I’m very
intrigued as to how they’ve faired...
My only teeny, tiny niggle with
the whole of Shipwrecked is that I sometimes
felt that Cruz slipped from a native Spanish speaker who had adorably stilted
English into a fluent American. Honestly though, he was so perfect I soon got
over it! Speaking of American-ness, I thought Siobhan Curham made all of her characters
feel authentically American in a way that they never manage when they try to be
British!
After the super creepy epilogue,
I’m dying to know what happens to Grace and co in the next book, but I also
think it could have ended before the epilogue and remained as a standalone with
a slightly mysterious ending. Saying that, I’m very much looking forward to
being reunited with the gorgeous Cruz and seeing just what Hortense is up
too...
For my 2013 British Books Challenge
Thanks to Electric Monkey for
providing me with a review copy.
Sophie
I wasn't sure about this at first, a cross between Lost and Lord of the Flies, but it sounds really good. I love how it tackles lots of issues, though I may wait for the sequel so I can read both together!
ReplyDeleteGreat review! I didn't know there was voodoo stuff in this: awesome! Definitely moving up my TBR pile!
ReplyDelete