“He loved the woman I was before I was in love with him.”
Although Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith begins when Lucie Bowen returns to Marrow Island, Washington, the story really begins 20 years earlier when the May Day Quake (a huge earthquake) rocked the west coast. At the same time, Lucie’s father died in an explosion at the oil refinery on Marrow Island. To escape this tragedy, Lucie and her mother left the islands and didn’t look back. That is, until her childhood friend Katie tells her that a community is living on Marrow Island again and that it’s no longer uninhabitable.
Lucie returns to the islands and finds a tight-knit community (with a slight cult-mentality in my opinion) restoring the land on which they live. In their quest to restore life on Marrow Island, the group takes things too far and Lucie walks right into the middle of it all…
I’m from the Pacific Northwest and I really enjoy reading about places you’ve lived from someone else’s perspective. Although Marrow Island is fictional, it’s based on real places and I could see similarities in the story to cities and islands in Washington. Marrow Island also focused on how people recover and move forward after huge natural disasters like the one described in the story.
While I think the idea for this book is interesting, the story jumps around and leaves a lot untold (allowing for readers to fill these gaps with assumptions), which isn’t my favorite writing style.
