Review: The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

This was one of my favorite books of the year.  Hands down.  I highly recommend it.  To sum it up, it is after World War I and Tom and his wife Isabel start out their married life on a deserted little island off the coast of Australia where Tom is the lightkeeper.  They try unsuccessfully to have a child of their own, but Isabel keeps having miscarriages.  Then one day a lifeboat washes up on the shore of the island.  Inside: a dead man and a baby that is still alive.  Isabel and Tom have to decide what they are going to do with the baby, and then live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

I really don't want to give too much of this book away, so let me just say that it is amazing.  There are some times where the story gets a bit slow, but Stedman's writing is so good that I just kept on reading because I was lost in her words.  The character development was also so well done.  I know I often say that I feel like I know the characters in really well written books, but with The Light Between Oceans I felt like I was the characters.  And not just Tom or Isabelle, but a few of the other characters as well.  I mean I felt exactly what they were feeling, to the point where I cried for probably the last 70 pages. 

The thing is, Stedman did the whole character development thing so well that you don't know whose side to choose.  Without getting into detail, I could completely empathize with and understand why Isabel and Tom did what they did, and then on the other hand, I also completely felt for the other main character in the book. 

Another aspect of the book that really got to me was how dedicated Tom and Isabel were to each other.  They had some really hard times, but they stuck together until the end and loved each other until the end, and that is real love.  It made me want to snuggle up with Boyfriend and spend more time with him.  I feel like nowadays people get divorced so often.  I wonder how many people could have worked through whatever problems they had and then been happy and together later on in life.  Of course, you never know what really goes on in others' relationships, but still..

And here are some of my favorite lines from this amazing book:
Page 32: Then, a moment's stillness.  Not silence: the waves still shattered on the rocks, the wind screeched around his ears, and a loose door on one of the storage sheds banged a disgruntled drumbeat.  But something inside Tom was still for the first time in years.

Page 71 (possibly one of my all-time favorite lines ever): There are times when the ocean is not the ocean-not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon.  It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff.  And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits.  Those are the nights the light is needed most.

Page 323: As she sank to her knees on the grass and sobbed, the memory of a conversation with Frank floated into her awareness.  "But how?  How can you just get over these things, darling?" she had asked him.  "You've had so much strife but you're always happy.  How do you do it?"
"I choose to," he said.  "I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget."
"But it's not that easy."
"He smiled that Frank smile.  "Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting.  You only have to forgive once.  To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.  You have to keep remembering all the bad things."  He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow.  "I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount.  That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic!  No"-his voice became sober-"we always have a choice.  All of us."

Title: The Light Between Oceans
Author: M. L. Stedman
Date of Publication: 2012
Number of Pages: 343
Genre: Fiction
Source: Personal Copy

My Favorite Books of the Year

A belated Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate, and a happy New Year :)  I've been happily spending time away from my computer this holiday season.  This was my first Christmas living with Boyfriend, which has been great.  We hosted our very first Christmas Eve dinner for my family, which was a lot of work but also a lot of fun!  I probably won't be posting much until after New Years because I'm spending a lot of time at the moment with friends and family, and Boyfriend and I are hopefully getting our very own dog very, very soon!

Here is a list of my favorite books read this year:

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

2. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

3. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

4. The Alienist by Caleb Carr

5. The Technologists by Matthew Pearl

6. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

7.  The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

8. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

So there you have it :)  I still have to post reviews for a few of those books, so look for those sometime after New Years!  What were your favorite books of 2012?

Review: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

So, my coworker knows me well.  She told me I would love this book, and I did.  Let's start with what it's about.  Because if you know me, as soon as you read what the book's about, you will understand why I love it so.  In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson tells the story of the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893-from the very beginning planning stages to the end of it.  But what many people don't know is that during that same time period, Chicago had a serial killer on the loose.  Because of all the people constantly coming and going, no one even realized that there was a serial killer.  So this books chronicals the fair from beginning to end, but also the goings on of Dr. H. H. Holmes, the serial killer.  Much of the parts about Holmes are speculation though, because the home where a lot of the evidence was found burned down to the ground in a fire before it could be properly investigated.  So you see why this book appealed to me.  Especially because it all took place in the 1800s when serial killers really weren't studied and there hadn't been many documented cases of them.

Larson's writing is for sure one of the reasons I loved this book so much.  I mean, I loved the story itself, but his writing takes you back into the 1800s.  He describes the city and how much it needed improvement.  It was a dirty place where people died accidentally and on purpose every day, and that helps to explain why no one realized that Holmes was murdering so many people.  The parts about the fair itself could have been a lot slower for me if Larson's writing didn't captivate me so much.  The fair takes up a good portion of the book, and I love history and all that, but honestly some of the information was slow to get past.  But it was Larson's writing that made you want to keep reading.

I thought the book was really well researched.  Considering there isn't really much information about Holmes and the people he murdered, Larson was able to dig up a lot of small details and surmise what may or may not have happened in a lot of cases. 

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history, especially of cities in the late 1800s, and also people interested in, of course, murders back them.  Not only because it was rare to have a serial killer on the loose back then (at least a documented one..), but because of the investigation that takes place after Holmes is found out.  The detectives who worked the case worked super hard to get evidence and find his last victims.

And now a favorite quote, for anyone interested in the early study of psychopaths:
Page 88:
At first alienists described this condition as "moral insanity" and those who exhibited the disorder as "moral imbeciles". They later adopted the term "psychopath", used in the lay press as early at 1885 in William Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a "new malady" and states, "Besides his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath." Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley the prototypical psychopath as "a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly…. So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that on one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real." People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as "Cleckley" psychopaths.


Title: The Devil in the White City
Author: Erik Larson
Date of Publication: February 10th, 2004
Number of Pages: 447
Genre: Nonfiction
Source: Lent to me by a friend