A group of strangers arrive on a beautiful but remote island, ready for the challenge of a lifetime: to live there for one year, without contact with the outside world.
But twelve months later, on the day when the boat is due to return for them, no one arrives.
Eight people stepped foot on the island. How many will make it off alive?
This is such a strange book to review. I really enjoyed it and Sarah Goodwin is a great writer but if I had to provide a summary then in all honesty, I don’t think that much really happened. However, I did really want to read more and struggled to put it down.
This is a novel that shows how one power hungry male, can influence a group to target the weakest member. I’d read a lot of things about this being like Lord of The Flies and so I’d expected a lot more murder amongst them, which we don’t get.
I also really struggled to believe that a reality tv show such as this wasn’t being aired on a weekly basis while it was being filmed, but instead was saved up until everyone left the island to then be edited and broadcast – so not going to happen.
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When Milla accepts an off-season invitation to Le Rocher, a cozy ski resort in the French Alps, she's expecting an intimate weekend of catching up with four old friends. It might have been a decade since she saw them last, but she's never forgotten the bond they forged on this very mountain during a winter spent fiercely training for an elite snowboarding competition.
Yet no sooner do Milla and the others arrive for the reunion than they realize something is horribly wrong. The resort is deserted. The cable cars that delivered them to the mountaintop have stopped working. Their cell phones--missing. And inside the hotel, detailed instructions await them: an icebreaker game, designed to draw out their secrets. A game meant to remind them of Saskia, the enigmatic sixth member of their group, who vanished the morning of the competition years before and has long been presumed dead.
Stranded in the resort, Milla's not sure what's worse: the increasingly sinister things happening around her or the looming snowstorm that's making escape even more impossible. All she knows is that there's no one on the mountain she can trust. Because someone has gathered them there to find out the truth about Saskia...someone who will stop at nothing to get answers. And if Milla's not careful, she could be the next to disappear...
I seriously loved this book!! Allie Reynolds is a former Snowboarding champion and that really came through in her writing, I don’t think any amount of research would have been able to convey so well the thoughts and fears of a professional snowboarder, yes, they could have wrote about the technical terms but I think you got an added depth to the story from her experience.
I really enjoyed the dual timeline, the present day where someone has called together a group of friends in order to find out what had happened to one of their group 10 years earlier. And 10 years earlier where we see the season leading up to the disappearance of Saskia.
Honestly, when you’re looking for who would have a motive for killing her, you’re not going to be short of suspects. She was one ruthless, evil person. I’d have quite happily buried her under an avalanche by half way through the book.
I think I suspected everyone at some point in this novel. However, the ending was ultimately pretty satisfying for me.
If you liked The Sanatorium, The Guest List or The Chalet then I would highly recommend this. I’ll be looking out for more work by Allie Reynolds.
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My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family.”
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.
By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.
In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.
The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it—the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity,
Wow, just wow. This is a book that really gets you in the feels.
I have to admit, I don’t know a lot about American History, there’s a few major political events that I’ve looked up but other than that I’m pretty oblivious. I had no clue about the events leading up to the depression in the 1930’s and so I had no pre-conceived ideas as to what this would actually be about. Holy shit, bleak doesn’t cover it. Kristin Hannah does such an amazing job of painting a picture of what it was like to live through the drought and the dust storms you can actually feel yourself struggling to breathe.
Elsa is such a wonderful, complex character, she’s not your usual leading lady. Her life is a struggle from the very beginning of the book and life doesn’t really let up on her. But she’s so easy to love, you really root for her, you want her to have the love that she deserves and the life that she deserves.
I really don’t think that anything I write in a review will do this book justice. Kristin Hannah is truly one of the best writers on the market at the moment. In The Four Winds she has taken a bleak period of time and made it accessible to the masses, something that you are desperate to read more about, with a character that you are deeply invested in. This book is historical fiction writing at it’s best.
Kristin Hannah pulls all the punches, her descriptions are so vivid you can really imagine what it was like to live with nothing. Reading this book will make you thankful for what you have, no matter how little you currently perceive that to be.
I read this shortly after reading Firefly Lane and the difference between Elsa and Cloud couldn’t be more stark. Elsa shows us just what a mum is willing to do to ensure the safety of her children and to try and get the best life for them. This is a woman who, when pushed, will give up everything that she loves, if it means a better future for her children. I’m not usually one for posting quotes from books but there is the most wonderful quote about motherhood in here
“A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.”
Stranded by Sarah Goodwin 
Shiver by 
The Four Winds by