BOOK REVIEW: The Island

Belonging to a book club that includes two RN’s, a veterinarian, and a retired biology teacher is hard for an English/theatre major. Usually our book choices are of interest to the whole group, but when the rest of the group picked a book on leprosy, I was hesitant, to say the least.

THE ISLAND by Victoria Hislop is a book that I never would have chosen on my own and I am not too sure how I felt about it. The fictional story is told in narrative, third person style so that it reads almost like a documentary. This was not sounding like your basic light summer read.

Alexis grew up in England with a mother and father who loved her. She always knew that her mother’s past held secrets. Her mother’s family had lived in Greece, but that is all that Alexis knew. Before leaving on a trip through the Mediterranean area with her boyfriend, Alexis is given the name of a woman who still lives in the small town of Plaka on the island of Crete. Fotini would be the best person to explain the past.

Plaka’s main reason to exist was to provide supplies to the island of Spinalonga, a leper colony, and Alexis decides to visit the now deserted island before going to meet Fotini. She had no idea how intimately her ancestors had known the island.

Fotini’s story told of four generations of the Petrakis family, going back to Eleni, Alexis’s great grandmother. Eleni was sent to Spinalonga when her daughters, Anna and Maria, were very young.  This was a time when leprosy was very contagious and carried great social stigma.

The story switches from the leper colony to the family left behind.We get to know the people who live on the two islands and the feeling of isolation of both. The emotions of the mother cut off from her children and the young girls who, missing their mother, had to take over caring for the household, made this a very real story.

Although the style of writing seemed impersonal for such a human story, I did feel that I got to know the characters and care about them. Using the frame of having Alexis being told about her ancestors still brought them to life.  

Most of all this is a story of leprosy told through the lives of four generations of women. Although a cure was developed shortly after the Second World War, it exists in parts of the world where fear and misunderstanding keep people from getting early treatment.