Read Alice Island A Novel Daniel Sánchez Arévalo 9781501171956 Books
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A happily married woman's perfect life shatters when her husband turns up dead hundreds of miles away from where he should have been, and she suddenly discovers that there was a part of him she knew nothing about.
Alice Dupont’s perfect marriage was a perfect lie. When her husband, Chris, dies in a car accident, far from where he should have been, Alice’s life falls apart. After the police close the case, she is left with more questions than answers. While learning to cope with her loss and her new identity as a single mother of two, Alice becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery surrounding her husband’s death and decides to start her own investigation. Retracing her husband's last known whereabouts, she soon discovers clues that lead her to a small island near Nantucket.
As she insinuates herself into the lives of the island’s inhabitants in an effort to discover what they knew about her husband, Alice finds herself increasingly involved in their private lives and comes to a disturbing realization she has been transformed into a person she no longer recognizes.
In seeking an answer to what her husband was doing before he died, Alice discovers not only a side of him she never knew, but sides of her own character she has never explored. Part mystery, part moving family drama, part psychological page-turner, Alice’s Island is a novel whose vivid characters hold the reader rapt right up until the final page.
Read Alice Island A Novel Daniel Sánchez Arévalo 9781501171956 Books
"I started out liking this book. I liked the characters. I liked the mystery. Then, I got to around 60-percent and I said, "Enough." I didn't care about anything. I went to 97-percent and didn't care enough to finish the book after I read enough to have a brief idea of what was going. Not much of a review; but, in my opinion, not much of a story."
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Alice Island A Novel Daniel Sánchez Arévalo 9781501171956 Books Reviews :
Alice Island A Novel Daniel Sánchez Arévalo 9781501171956 Books Reviews
- I started out liking this book. I liked the characters. I liked the mystery. Then, I got to around 60-percent and I said, "Enough." I didn't care about anything. I went to 97-percent and didn't care enough to finish the book after I read enough to have a brief idea of what was going. Not much of a review; but, in my opinion, not much of a story.
- Alice’s Island starts out with a mystery that quickly turns into an obsession.
Chris is killed on a road he shouldn’t have been on while traveling home to his very pregnant wife, Alice. Alice obsesses about finding out where Chris was on the night of his death. Once she uncovers his secret life, she spends a healthy chunk of Chris’ $1.5 million insurance on spying on the neighbors in Chris’ hideaway.
In Alice’s Island, Alice goes off the rails and really should have spent her money on therapy. It is painful to watch her continuing downward spiral. Worse, after the first 25% of the book, the constant spying on her new neighbors was just boring. I kept thinking it would tie together in the end. It, or at least most of it, didn’t.
However, the romance was interesting. If you don’t mind having an unsympathetic narrator, you may like Alice’s Island. But for me it was a 3 star read.
Thanks to Atria Books and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review. - A beautifully written story of great loss, the seeking of redemption and eventually finding of one's self. Alice Dupont is a happily married woman enjoying life with her adoring husband Chris. It is obvious that each has found the perfect mate in the other. They have one young daughter and Alice pregnant with another child. Chris had founded a small business building tennis courts which has become successful enough possibly due to his background of playing tennis on a semi professional basis. His work takes him to sites around his home area in getting business. He has always kept in close touch with Alice while traveling and made it obvious that it is her that he thinks about.
Suddenly Alice's world comes crashing down on her head when she receives a dreaded call from the police that Chris has been severely injured in an auto crash. She rushes to the hospital that he is in but unfortunately only in time to learn that he has passed away from his injuries. After the funeral Alice decides that in order to find some sort of closure she has to learn about the project he has been working on when killed. When she finds that the accident occurred several hundred miles away from where he was scheduled to be Alice decides to discover where he actually was and what he was doing. Determination is made that Chris was on an island near Nantucket in Massachusetts. Made independent by a hefty insurance settlement Alice moves to that island and begins her search for Chris' reason to be there and if he had been there more than once.
The story of her search and her experiences in befriending other residents of the island comprise the major part of the novel. There is no horror to the story and one that follows Alice's closure as well as that of several of the island's residents. Written originally in Spanish and later translated into English Mr Sanchez Arelvalo's novel reaches a level of beauty that does captivate the reader. The ending is well done and an adventure into a level of prose that is a pleasure to find and certainly indicative of both a very skilled author and a translator that has complete understanding of the nuances of both English and Spanish. I trust that we will see additional works by the author translated into English for our great enjoyment. - Alice's Island by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo is a so-so domestic mystery.
Alice Dupont's husband dies of natural causes, a brain aneurysm, in his car miles away from where he said he was. Alice, soon to be the mother of two, undertakes an investigation of her own to find out why her husband was on the road where his car was found and where he had been coming from before that, as he was clearly on his way home from somewhere else. She retraces her husband's trip and finds clues that lead her to Robin Island, a small island located near Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Alice moves to the island, using her maiden name, with her two daughters, six-year-old Olivia and infant Ruby. She then sets out to spy on the residents of the small island in an attempt to find out what her husband was doing and if he was cheating on her.
This is Arévalo's first novel to appear in English. Perhaps something was lost in the translation, as far as the actual writing goes, so I'm giving a pass to any quibbles with the writing and the dialogue. I can say that the novel felt padded and I was losing patience with it and Alice. The search was interminable and, well, stupid and pointless. She wanted to know where he had been, so why not tell the truth to people? Why make up a lie? Why move to the island and continue lying? Why not simply tell people who you are and what you want to know? All the bribing people, clandestine spying on people, and supposition about what could have happened was pointless and especially trying on this reader.
Alice herself starts out as a sympathetic character. Her husband has just died, she is close to having their second daughter, and she doesn't know why he was in that part of the country. Then she starts to lose credibility as her weird search for "the truth" begins along with her needless lying. She loses all sympathy when she begins spending large sums of money (at a conveniently placed spy store) to actively spy and snoop on people and begins an affair with a married man. A novel with an interesting start, tedious overly-padded middle, and uninteresting, albeit happy, ending.
Disclosure My review copy was courtesy of Atria Books.
