After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a “gift from God,” and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.
This is another book that has had a lot of hype surround it, especially since the film adaptation starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander came out in September of 2016. Heck, even Oprah gave it her seal of approval when the book was first released.
But, does it live up to the hype? Yes. But also, no.
The Light Between Oceans is an incredibly well-written book. M.L. Stedman has an incredible narrative voice. Parts of the dialogue were a bit hard to follow since it takes on the local Australian dialect, but that made it be all the more compelling, and almost forced me to pay attention more. Since this novel is more character-driven than plot-driven, we get to see what makes the characters tick; there are always some characters that instantly work, and some that need more time to convince you. I instantly fell in love with the character of Tom. Of the two, his story was more connecting, and I felt more sympathy for him than I did for Isabel, I think probably because we find out more and more about Tom's backstory, and his life before and during his service in World War I, and you come to understand why he does certain things than we do with Isabel; he's a man of honour who is torn between doing the right thing by the baby, but also doing right by his wife. I did have much sympathy for Isabel, yet I still found her to be completely frustrating at times, but I feel like that was intentional so we could feel the helplessness of their situation.
I found the latter half of this book to be the part where things really heated up and I found I couldn't put the book down. I wanted to know what was going to happen to Lucy and if she would eventually find her birth mother. Of the other characters, I liked Hannah, and I particularly liked her father Septimus, both of whom, have also known their fair shares of tragedy. While all the characters had their own tragedies, the two I found myself rooting the most for were Tom and Hannah (and to a less greater extent,the baby, who is innocent through all of this). I found the second half of this book to be the more interesting half. Not that the first half wasn't interesting. The first half was where we had the set-up, while the second half was where we get the pay-off. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I like the payoff better than the setup because that's where we get to see, well, the payoff of what the novel has been building up to, and the repercussions of said set-up are always more interesting to see, and makes the set-up more compelling in retrospect.
So does it live up to the hype? As I said, yes in some areas. It makes you care about certain characters and the outcomes of the characters. It's a book that draws you in right away with the themes of war, family and love, and the writing style is amazingly done. In those ways, it is multifaceted. That being said, I feel like I would have enjoyed this book a bit better if I hadn't known about all the hype surrounding it. Sometimes hype is helpful, and other times hype is a hindrance from fully enjoying a book. I didn't cry. I came close a few times, though.
All in all, I liked The Light Between Oceans. As a character-driven novel, it works well, with meticulous writing style and good set-up and payoff between the first part and the second part. While I connected with some characters more than others, it is a believable and compelling story that I enjoyed reading. It was hard to put the book down. While I would have appreciated this book more without so much of the hype (some of that, though, comes from the movie), it was still overall an enjoyable book, that has real depth of emotion. However, while some of the characters were relatable, others were frustrating at times. In addition, it also had the tendency to be overly melodramatic at times, both of which subtracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. For these reasons, I'm going to give The Light Between Oceans a 3.5/5.
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