4.5 stars. Torn between wanting to read slowly and appreciate the excellent writing and wanting to read fast to find out what happens next in the excellent plot. Lovely descriptions. ( )

Tom, once a hero on the Western Front, elects to become a lighthouse guard on a small otherwise deserted Australian Island, and can't believe his luck when the sprightly delightful Isabel reveals that she'd like to share his life there. When a boat washes up with a dead man and a live baby, Tom must decide between taking a course of action dictated to him by his conscience, or the one that his beloved Isabel implores him to follow.
Very well written...the reader, Noah Taylor, however, uses volume as one of the tools to distinguish characters ....and in general often continues to read when he's out of air, which would probably be fine if I wasn't trying to hear it over the noise of the car on the road while driving. I was constantly adjusting the volume up and down to avoid missing words whispered, or uttered in an Australian accent beneath his breath, or blasted out after he took a breath and launched into a stronger character's dialog. It's a shame though because otherwise he has a great feel for the characters, tenor, and delivery in general. ( )

I read this book for a book club I was in at the time…were it not for that, I wouldn’t have picked the book up, at all, regardless for the hype. The synopsis did nothing for me. That, should have been my first clue…

The decisions of the characters in the story were just so off-putting to me that it was a depressing and torturous read. I cannot and will not see how their decisions are “okay” or “understandable”.
I understand (from reading other reviews) that many readers felt a connection to Isabel and what she had gone through, and that because of that they could feel sympathy towards her and her decisions, however disastrous they may have been. I, on the other hand, was not one of those people.

It’s one star redemption was the writing. Great writing. In fact, let me know when Stedman writes something that doesn’t have appalling decisions made by the characters in her stories.

Full review: wanderinglectiophile.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/review-the-light-between-oceans-by-m-l-stedman/ ( )

This is a novel that requires the reader to exercise a good deal of empathy in relation to the characters. Such empathy may be easier to come by if you have ever created a child and can feel what that typically does to a person. If you read this novel without that empathy, from an emotional distance, I doubt you will like it.

Set in 1920s western Australia, the central character is a returning soldier from the WWI front lines. Tom Sherbourne survived the war physically intact but longing for quiet and structure, which he finds manning an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock. The small administrative town on the mainland is hours away by boat, and there he meets a younger woman who will become his wife and move with him to the small island as its only inhabitants, connected to the rest of the world only by a telegraph line and a supply boat that comes every 3 months.

Desperately wanting a child, Isabel instead suffers three miscarriages; the last one at 7 months along. It is shortly after that that a small boat washes up on shore containing a dead man, a live infant, and a woman's sweater. Tom is persuaded by Isabel to at first wait until the next morning to report this, and seeing her with the baby he decides to grant her this. But by morning Isabel has a grander idea. Convincing herself that the sweater means the mother must have drowned, leaving the baby an orphan, and safely delivered to the island by the hand of God, she wants to keep the child and present it to the world as their own. Is this reasonable, no. Understanding that she has been left deeply emotionally affected by her series of miscarriages, the most recent one a very fresh wound, makes her delusions and actions more comprehensible.

Tom has emerged from the barbarity of the war with his sense of morality, if anything, even stronger. He has sworn to himself never to hurt anyone again. He should have the strength of will to resist his wife's pleading, but he cannot. He buries the dead man and hopes to God that his wife's interpretation of events is correct. Of course, it is not, and on a shore break two years later they discover the truth about how the baby and father came to be in the boat, leaving the baby's mother grieving and heartbroken, yet still clinging to hope that her husband and child are somehow alive somewhere.

What follows is a series of tortuous decisions and wrestling with consciences. Depending on the viewpoint, there are betrayals, selfishness, selflessness, recklessness, sacrifice, heroes and villians. At the center is the child, who grows into a young girl. The story is not always elegantly told; Stedman is a first time novelist and is sometimes clumsy and, worse, predictable. But if you can feel the emotions of everyone involved, the story is pretty gripping.

Received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publisher's Weekly. ( )

Great book, but very emotional! My heart was so torn between the feelings of all the characters! ( )