Monday, February 13, 2023

*Review* The Island by Natasha Preston


Genre: YA Thriller
Published: February 28, 2023
Pages: 336


Hot on the heels of the New York Times bestsellers The Twin and The Lake, another pulse-pounding read from the undisputed queen of YA thrillers!

They said goodbye to their friends and family for the weekend. They weren’t counting on forever.


Jagged Island: a private amusement park for the very rich—or the very influential. Liam, James, Will, Ava, Harper, and Paisley—social media influencers with millions of followers—have been invited for an exclusive weekend before the park opens. They’ll make posts and videos for their channels and report every second of their VIP treatment. 

When the teens arrive, they're stunned: the resort is even better than they’d imagined. Their hotel rooms are unreal, the park’s themed rides are incredible, and the island is hauntingly beautiful. They’re given a jam-packed itinerary for the weekend.  

But soon they'll discover that something's missing from their schedule: getting off the island alive.


I received a copy of this book through Netgalley. This is my honest review. 

This book had some strong I Still Know What You Did Last Summer vibes to it. Teens are lured to an island on false pretenses to be murdered. But the reason they were invited to the island makes sense with the current social (media) landscape. You want to draw crowds to an island amusement park, you gotta' get the word out about it somehow, and it's teens that are going to be begging their parents to take them, right? And how do you influence teenagers now? TikTok of course (I think, I'm pretty sure TikTok is the big one right now). 

I felt like the mystery of the killer was a little disappointing. At 22% in, I'd picked two people that I very strongly suspected, and one of them was right, and the other was the reason. And I wish I could say that further events made me doubt myself, but that would be a lie. Some of them did make go "well maybe" for about a nano-second before I dismissed it. But I'm usually pretty good at figuring things like this out, or knowing who is going to survive (because you have to have survivors to have a story!) 

There was one twist towards the end that I did NOT see coming. It caught me off guard because it felt like it came out of nowhere. But it made a certain amount of sense. 

I could absolutely see this book being turned into a teen horror flick in the vein of I Know What You Did Last Summer, probably by Netflix. If that does happen, I'm totally going to take credit for giving them the idea too. 

Overall I give this book 3.97 out of 5 stars. - Katie 




Natasha Preston is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Cellar, The Cabin, Awake, You Will Be Mine, The Lost, The Twin, The Lake, The Fear, and her latest, The Island. A UK native, she discovered her love of writing when she shared a story online—and hasn't looked back. She enjoys writing romance, thrillers, gritty YA, and the occasional serial killer.

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