Category: Reading Challenges

Blog Tour/Book Review: Island on Fire by Sophie Schiller

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Island on Fire_Blog Tour Banner_FINAL

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Island on Fire by Sophie Schiller, set in the Caribbean island of Martinique.  Having been lucky enough to visit Martinique, albeit only for a day as a port of call on a Caribbean cruise, I simply couldn’t resist the invitation from Amy at Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours to read and review the book.  You can find my review below.

On the tour page, you can check out the other great book bloggers taking part in the tour with links to their reviews of Island on Fire.  For example, Stacie at Pursuing Stacie described it as ‘an enjoyable, fast-paced historical fiction’, praising the author’s ‘impeccable research’.  Ashley at Oh, October described the book as ‘unique, well researched historical fiction’ and Briennai at Bri’s Book Nook loved the beautiful setting.

WinIf those comments have piqued your interest and you’re a US resident then, good news, as there’s a giveaway with a chance for one lucky person to win their very own copy of Island on Fire. Enter via the Gleam form at the bottom of the tour page.  Don’t hang about though as entries close on 14th August 2018.

Island on FireAbout the Book

In the lush, tropical world of Martinique where slavery is a distant memory and voodoo holds sway, Emilie Dujon discovers that her fiancé, a rich sugar planter, has been unfaithful. Desperate to leave him, she elicits the aid of a voodoo witch doctor and is lured into a shadowy world of black magic and extortion. When the volcano known as Mount Pelée begins to rumble and spew ash, she joins a scientific committee sent to investigate the crater. During the journey she meets Lt. Denis Rémy, an army officer with a mysterious past.

At the summit, the explorers discover that a second crater has formed and the volcano appears to be on the verge of eruption. But when they try to warn the governor, he orders them to bury the evidence for fear of upsetting the upcoming election. As the pressure builds, a deadly mudslide inundates Emilie’s plantation and she disappears. With ash and cinders raining down, chaos ensues. Left with no choice, Lt. Rémy deserts his post and sets off on a desperate quest to rescue Emilie. But with all roads blocked, can they escape the doomed city of St. Pierre before it’s too late?

Format: ebook, paperback (270 pp.)    Publisher:
Published: 15th March 2018          Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Island on Fire on Goodreads

My Review

In Island on Fire the author creates a picture of a society where, much like the volcano, a lot is going on underneath the surface, whether that is commercial and political machinations or continued belief in voodoo practices in an age of modern science and rationality.

Despite evidence to the contrary, those in authority choose to believe that there is no threat from the volcano, having more regard to the consequences of panic by the population than the possible risk to life and property. This will prove to have disastrous consequences.

The book’s heroine, Emilie, whilst in all other respects an intelligent, independent-minded young woman, reflects the dichotomy in Martinique society. As a result she acts in a way that seems out of character but which reflects the desperation she feels at the situation in which she finds herself.

Whilst the book description reveals much of the story (a little too much to my mind), the author creates a credible sense of melodrama as events unfold in dramatic fashion.

I really enjoyed the evocative portrayal of the island’s lush landscape, vegetation and wildlife. ‘Everywhere he looked, the island was teeming with life. Mango trees, sprawling bougainvillea, flaming flamboyant, majestic palm trees, and endless plantations dotting the hillsides like a parchwork quilt of sumptuous beauty.’ Plus, as regular followers of this blog will know, I can’t resist delicious descriptions of food and there are plenty of the local cuisine in the book.

Island on Fire reveals a fascinating aspect of the history of Martinique that was new to me as well as being an entertaining, if slightly melodramatic, story of betrayal, honour and love

I received a review copy courtesy of the author and Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Romance, melodrama, adventure

Try something similar…Fireburn by Apple Gidley

Sophie SchillerAbout the Author

Sophie Schiller was born in Paterson, NJ and grew up in the West Indies. She loves stories that carry the reader back in time to exotic and far-flung locations. Kirkus Reviews called her “an accomplished thriller and historical adventure writer”. Her latest novel is Island on Fire, a thriller about the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century. She was educated at American University, Washington, DC and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Buchan of the Month: Introducing…Huntingtower

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Buchan of the MonthHuntingtower is the eighth book in my John Buchan reading project, Buchan of the Month. To find out more about the project and my reading list for 2018, click here.  If you would like to read along with me you will be very welcome – leave a comment on this post or on my original challenge post.  I’ll be sharing my review later this month.  What follows is an introduction to the book (no spoilers!).

HuntingtowerHuntingtower was published in the UK in August 1922 by Hodder & Stoughton and in the US in November 1922 by George H Doran Company.  Like many of Buchan’s early novels, it had first appeared in serial form, in this case in Street & Smith’s The Popular Magazine in the editions published on 20th August and 7th September 1921.

David Daniell, author of The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan, describes Huntingtower as ‘a stirring adventure’ and notes that it was the first novel Buchan wrote at Elsfield, the house in Oxfordshire that became his family home.  Buchan scholar Kate MacDonald, describes Huntingtower as an ‘ostensibly gentle thriller’ with ‘elements of classic Stevensonian romance’, a comparison Buchan would no doubt have been happy with given that Robert Louis Stevenson, along with Sir Walter Scott, was one of his literary heroes.

Huntingtower introduces readers to Dickson McCunn, retired middle-aged Glasgow grocer.  He is based on Scottish literary professor, William Paton Ker, to whom the book is dedicated.  In the book, along with modernist English poet, John Heritage, and Scottish landowner, Archie Roylance, Dickson McCunn becomes involved in the rescue of Princess Saskia who has been captured by a group of dastardly Bolsheviks.   The book also introduces the reader to the gang of street urchins known as the ‘Gorbals Die-Hards’ – a sort of equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ trusty ‘Baker Street Irregulars’.  Kate MacDonald sees the Gorbals Die-Hards as Buchan’s response to the overly sentimental treatment of children (and of rural life in general) in the so-called ‘Kailyard School’ of Scottish fiction that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Dickson McCunn was to feature in two further Buchan novels – Castle Gay (1930) and The House of the Four Winds (1935) – although MacDonald describes these as ‘continuations’ rather than sequels.   Hodder & Stoughton published a compendium of the stories in 1937 under the title Adventures of Dickson McCunn. A film version of Huntingtower was released in 1927 starring the well-known Scottish music-hall artist of the time, Harry Lauder, as Dickson McCunn.  A six-part BBC TV series was broadcast in 1957 and there was a second adaptation in 1978.

Huntingtower was a reasonable commercial success, selling 18,000 copies in its first year of publication.  Buchan’s biographer, Janet Adam Smith, reports that by 1960 it had combined sales of 230,000.  Huntingtower was published by Penguin in 1956 and this edition had sold 104,000 copies by June 1964.

Sources:

David Daniell, The Interpreter’s House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan (Nelson, 1975)

Kate Macdonald, John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (McFarland, 2009)

Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan: A Biography (OUP, 1985 [1965])