I read this book for a book club I was in at the time…were it not for that, I wouldn’t have picked the book up, at all, regardless for the hype. The synopsis did nothing for me. That, should have been my first clue…

The decisions of the characters in the story were just so off-putting to me that it was a depressing and torturous read. I cannot and will not see how their decisions are “okay” or “understandable”.
I understand (from reading other reviews) that many readers felt a connection to Isabel and what she had gone through, and that because of that they could feel sympathy towards her and her decisions, however disastrous they may have been. I, on the other hand, was not one of those people.

It’s one star redemption was the writing. Great writing. In fact, let me know when Stedman writes something that doesn’t have appalling decisions made by the characters in her stories.

Full review: wanderinglectiophile.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/review-the-light-between-oceans-by-m-l-stedman/ ( )

This is a novel that requires the reader to exercise a good deal of empathy in relation to the characters. Such empathy may be easier to come by if you have ever created a child and can feel what that typically does to a person. If you read this novel without that empathy, from an emotional distance, I doubt you will like it.

Set in 1920s western Australia, the central character is a returning soldier from the WWI front lines. Tom Sherbourne survived the war physically intact but longing for quiet and structure, which he finds manning an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock. The small administrative town on the mainland is hours away by boat, and there he meets a younger woman who will become his wife and move with him to the small island as its only inhabitants, connected to the rest of the world only by a telegraph line and a supply boat that comes every 3 months.

Desperately wanting a child, Isabel instead suffers three miscarriages; the last one at 7 months along. It is shortly after that that a small boat washes up on shore containing a dead man, a live infant, and a woman's sweater. Tom is persuaded by Isabel to at first wait until the next morning to report this, and seeing her with the baby he decides to grant her this. But by morning Isabel has a grander idea. Convincing herself that the sweater means the mother must have drowned, leaving the baby an orphan, and safely delivered to the island by the hand of God, she wants to keep the child and present it to the world as their own. Is this reasonable, no. Understanding that she has been left deeply emotionally affected by her series of miscarriages, the most recent one a very fresh wound, makes her delusions and actions more comprehensible.

Tom has emerged from the barbarity of the war with his sense of morality, if anything, even stronger. He has sworn to himself never to hurt anyone again. He should have the strength of will to resist his wife's pleading, but he cannot. He buries the dead man and hopes to God that his wife's interpretation of events is correct. Of course, it is not, and on a shore break two years later they discover the truth about how the baby and father came to be in the boat, leaving the baby's mother grieving and heartbroken, yet still clinging to hope that her husband and child are somehow alive somewhere.

What follows is a series of tortuous decisions and wrestling with consciences. Depending on the viewpoint, there are betrayals, selfishness, selflessness, recklessness, sacrifice, heroes and villians. At the center is the child, who grows into a young girl. The story is not always elegantly told; Stedman is a first time novelist and is sometimes clumsy and, worse, predictable. But if you can feel the emotions of everyone involved, the story is pretty gripping.

Received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publisher's Weekly. ( )

Great book, but very emotional! My heart was so torn between the feelings of all the characters! ( )

Tom Sherbourne is a decorated Australian WWI veteran who is on his way to a remote island, Janus Rock, off the southern coast of Australia to be the keeper of the island’s lighthouse. To get there, he must first transport via ship to Partageuse, where, if he is accepted, he will be taken to the island by a smaller boat to relieve the current lighthouse keeper, who apparently went mad. In Partageuse, Tom meets a young woman named Isabel Graysmark, and he is taken with her. When he receives his first supplies and mail three months later, she has written to him and he writes back, and they make plans to marry when he gets his first leave at the end of his first year.
Still carrying around survivor’s guilt from WWI, as well as issues from his childhood, Tom has trouble opening up fully, despite all of Isabel’s coaxing, although he is clearly in love with her. Even when he takes Isabel to the island, where they are the only inhabitants, he is unable to share his past. Over the first several years they live on the island, Isabel miscarries twice and then has a stillborn son and descends into a dark depression until one day a dinghy washes up on the beach carrying a dead man and a crying baby girl wrapped in a woman’s sweater. Tom wants to alert the authorities immediately, but Isabel convinces him to wait until the next day, by which time she has become so attached the baby, and seeing her so revitalized, Tom overcomes his uneasiness and, against his better judgment, they raise the girl, who they name Lucy. They write to Isabel’s parents about the birth of their granddaughter rather than that they buried a stillborn grandson. Tom buries the dead man near the beach where long-ago victims of a shipwreck are buried. Tom goes to set the boat adrift in the sea and discovers a silver rattle, which he gives to Lucy.
During the family's first leave from Janus Rock two years after Lucy turned up, Tom learns that a local woman, Hannah Roennfeldt, daughter of the wealthiest man in Partageuse, has been mourning the mysterious loss of her husband Frank, an Austrian ex-pat, and their two-month old daughter, Grace. Frank had jumped into a boat to get away from a drunken mob of WWI veterans who assailed him , calling him a Hun. Given the timing of the disappearance, when he hears the story, Tom has no doubt that Frank was the dead man in the boat, and that Lucy is Hannah's daughter, Grace. He wants to tell Hannah Roennfeldt the truth, but Isabel is outraged by this idea, convinced that it will harm Lucy. He acquiesces once again and they return to Janus Rock. However, a note turns up in Hannah’s mailbox indicated that her daughter is alive and safe.
The Sherbourne family returns to the mainland again two years later, when Lucy is four, and this time, they encounter the tortured Hannah. Unable to keep silent any longer, Tom leaves Hannah Lucy/Grace’s silver rattle. The rattle is photographed for the newspaper, and a deckhand on the boat that supplies the Sherbournes tells his mother he saw the rattle on Janus Rock, and she convinces him to tell the police in order to collect the generous reward offered by Hannah’s father. The police turn up on Janus Rock, and Tom lies to them and takes all the responsibility for not reporting the appearance of the boat with the dead Frank and baby Lucy. More unfolds afterwards; in the end, Lucy-Grace is returned to Hannah, and Tom does a short stint in jail, and he and Isabel move away. They eventually buy a farm and live out the rest of Isabel’s life there, another 20 years, until she succumbs to cancer. Shortly after he buries Isabel, Lucy-Grace visits, hoping to see both of them. She herself has an infant son, and had been in the service in WWII, and shared with Tom that she had some memories of her time with Tom and Isabel. The ending is neither uplifting nor sad, but has a melancholy feel to it. Well written, dynamic characters, interesting story line.
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This is another tough one. It came highly recommended by lots of different people, so perhaps my expectations were too high. Mostly, I found it aggravating.

There are parts of the book that I enjoyed. I liked Tom quite a lot. I loved reading about the quiet life of a Lighthouse keeper. In fact - I wanted to read a whole book about that! I found Isobel annoying. She pops into the story suddenly, she seems fun but the courtship is fast (out on necessity) and from that point things are rushed. I wish we felt more of the journey of their marriage and more about her despair over the lost babies. The decision making is crazy and I guess it's explained, but I didn't feel like it was earned.

Once they get Lucy, everything Izzy did annoyed me more than the last. Hannah too grated. I'm sure part of it is the fact that I am not a mother (have never wanted to be a mother) so their behavior seems insane to me, although maybe it's legit primal instinct.

The resolution seems unsatisfying too. The benevolence of dead Frank just arrived out of left field.

Aside from all of that, I didn't really enjoy the writing either. It seemed very remote and standoffish at times. Perhaps because that is Tom's personality? I don't know. It just didn't quite sit properly with me.

It sounds like I really disliked the book. That's not true, but for me it was just OK.


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