Thursday, May 3, 2018

Book Review: The Blue Lagoon, by Henry De Vere Stacpoole

The Blue Lagoon by Henry De Vere Stacpoole book cover and review
I chose The Blue Lagoon because I was browsing through my Serial Reader selections, and it said this was a romance.  Every description of this book says it's a romance.  While I really enjoyed it, I just don't consider it much of a romance.

Dicky and Emmeline are stranded on an island in the South Pacific after a storm sinks the ship they were sailing on.  They end up in a lifeboat with Paddy, one of the cooks on the ship. Paddy takes care of them and teaches them how to survive on the lush tropical island where they end up. After a couple of years, Paddy dies.

The romance doesn't even occur until we are well into the second half of The Blue Lagoon. It is fairly sudden.  They discover each other's bodies, fall in love, and have a lot of sex, but then they move on to surviving and other things that I don't want to spoil.

The Blue Lagoon is very much a survival story.  They run into all the potential dangers that one can think of in that situation.  Storms, sharks, whalers, savages, and more try to end them.  But they are surprisingly resilient even though very young.

I was stunned to find out that The Blue Lagoon is the first book in a trilogy.  I thought series books were a relatively new concept, but these books were written in the early 1900s. I'm already looking forward to the second book, The Garden of God.

The Blue Lagoon is easy to read, other than some of Paddy's dialect. It is a sweet story that teens and adults can enjoy, even though it was written so long ago.

Published by T. Fisher Unwin, 1908
Copy obtained from Serial Reader
328 pages

Rating: 4/5





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2 comments:

  1. Ok. Is this book related at all to the Brooke Shields movie, Blue Lagoon? That's the image I couldn't get out of my head :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. That movie is based on this book (and there are several other movies too...)

      Delete

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