3 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
Island Games by Caleb J. Boyer is an adventure thriller, which is written from a third person perspective. The book is of short length having only 232 pages in it. The starting scene begins with Ryan and Mathew, the two teenage boys, lying on a beach of an unknown island and baffling between their conscious and unconscious state for a long time. After regaining their full consciousness, they don’t have any clue about where they are, and how they came there. After some time they begin to worry about getting the basic amenities like food, water, and shelter in order to survive on that island. In the meanwhile, they are exposed to the unknown dangers of that place. Will these boys survive all the dangers until the end?
As the boys begin their search for the basic amenities as well as the means to escape from this mysterious island, they discover that what they see with eyes is only a tip of the iceberg. They pass through a series of confrontations with the fatal dangers that come along their way, which challenges them to test their strength, courage, intelligence, and depth of their friendship.
The character development was quite impressive as the author had maintained a nice balance between the contrasting characters like one boy with a goofy mindset and another boy with a practical mindset. Ryan and Mathew were always supportive of each other; however, at times they were sarcastic toward one another with a long bantering back and forth between them that made me laugh. All this made me recall my teenage days.
Even though the book is targeted at young adults, I believe that teenagers will love this book very much because it resonates powerfully with them. I recommend this book to the teenage and above age group people who want to entertain themselves with an action-packed, thrilling story that could bring them to the edge of their seats. However, the book does not have the very intense action scenes so that only the people with a strong heart can read it, and anyone can have a shallow dip in it.
The thing I liked the most is that this book depicts the importance of teamwork and how it pays off. Moreover, it was quite fun and rewarding to read. The story sometimes appeared to me like a wishful dream in the Gulliver’s travels stories, and it gave some relaxation to my mind. I was amazed to know that this book was written by a twelve-year-old boy. I picked up this book because I expected that it may entertain me, and I realized that it met my expectations after reading the book. Nothing ever in this book bored me.
I do not recommend this book for those who need the story-line close to reality because this book has some elements that do not seem to be practical in real life. Sometimes while reading, I had a feeling of playing an action-packed video game. The only thing I disliked about this book is its short length, and also details given in describing the scenes were bit insufficient, and thereby, leaving it to the readers to imagine themselves.
This book deserves a full rating of four stars if it goes through another round of professional editing, but I found several grammatical errors in this book. One of the errors is in the sentence “They had needed to pull together …..”, which should have been “They needed to pull together …..” to look more appropriate. Another error is in the sentence “He was hopeful the beasts would not return …..”, which should have been “He was hopeful that the beasts would not return …..” to make it look correct. However, these errors do not distort the meaning of the sentences. Moreover, the lucid writing made the pages to turn very fast, and I could complete it reading within two days. I could give only 3 out of 4 stars because of the grammatical errors and my dislikes mentioned earlier.
******
Island Games
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Like sanjus's review? Post a comment saying so!
