Group Read, October 2018: Wild Harbour

Our October group read is Wild Harbour by Ian MacPherson. Please join the read and post any comments on this thread.

Ordered my copy. Look forward to the readalong!

I started the book today, and I am currently reading another book set in WW II, but both very different from one another.

I have completed my read of Wild Harbour by Ian Macpherson and I was totally impressed with this book. I love survival stories and this was a great blend of a survival story, a love story and a political message.

>4 DeltaQueen50: You've convinced me to download this to my kindle (it was cheaper than buying the paperback with the creepy cover!). I can't promise I'll get to it this month, though. I haven't had a ton of reading time and I have a lot of new releases coming available at the library all at once.

I agree with DeltaQueen50 - I was impressed by this book. It was prescient of the dark days coming and the tension built by the time shifts was a good technique, it would have been hard to sustain interest with every day being detailed. We didn't get many details of their life before and we didn't really see much from Terry's point of view. I felt that I would have gone insane being left behind in the cave each day like a 1930s housewife and not being more proactive. Was that because she didn't have the survival skills?
Really glad to have read this and I will look out more of his work - a shame his life was cut short.

I finished the book today. One word of warning for any others starting the group read - DO NOT READ THE INTRODUCTION; it gives away every plot point. Fortunately I didn't read it and so could get caught up in the increasing tension as the book progressed.

I found Hugh hard to empathise with as he had his rages and fits of depression, and at times Terry seemed impractical, but in both cases it was likely a fairly realistic portrayal of a couple caught up in this extreme scenario. Similarly I thought the highs and lows of preparing their refuge in the wilderness seemed realistic rather than the more romanticized "desert island" type stories.

Overall worth a read - but SKIP THE INTRODUCTION.

>5 japaul22: I hope you enjoy Wild Harbour but no matter what, at least it is a short book. :)

>7 puckers: Thanks for the warning! Am close to finishing My Brilliant Friend so should be starting this one soon.

Am now reading this book. It is so totally not my kind of book that I am finding it a struggle. Interesting work that I would never have picked up without the list or even without the group read. I'll be glad to have read it when I finish. I'll also be glad when I finish it!

I've also started. It's also not my kind of book, but it's short and, who knows, maybe I'll end up liking it.

I finished this last night -- I expected to like it a lot more than I did. Terry and Hugh were just so grating and hysterical that I couldn't really enjoy the novel. I rolled my eyes at every "Oh Terry," "Oh Terry!"

Hugh is insufferable on so many levels, Terry way too passive. He should be a lot kinder & more appreciative, given that she is only there because he didn’t want to be drafted. Right? Which I don’t quite get because how old do we think he is? He seems older than first-draft age.

Possibly I have missed crucial details because I am skimming this quite a bit.

@annamorphic It said something about him being among the first drafted because of his prior military experience, but didn't get into much detail about it.

There’s also a passage where he remembers how pacifists and those who didn’t volunteer were scorned by society. He may have felt that even if he was too old to be drafted, he’d feel societal pressure to volunteer.

I also think part of their decision to live apart from society was a general anti-war feeling, where they knew they couldn’t change things but didn’t want to feel they had to conform to supporting war. So they chose to remove themselves from the situation.

But, yeah, they are both highly annoying. I’m about half way through.

I've finished this too. It wasn't for me, the dialogue really grated on me, but I did find the concept interesting.

After finishing, though, I thought
there was a lot of death considering they tried to remove themselves from war to avoid taking part in that. Did you think it was ok because they were "protecting" themselves? Do you think they achieved what they wanted in any way? Because I really didn't and found that pretty disheartening. It was sad that they did so much to try to escape war and it ended up finding them anyway and they, to my mind, ended up participating pretty fully.

>16 japaul22: My take on this book was that the author was trying to show the brutality and senselessness of war but also point out that when it comes to life-altering events, that one can't hide themselves away, sooner or later it catchs up with you. In life one's choices are often limited or even taken away entirely, there is no happy solution here.

I had started this back in October and haven't been able to make it very far in, so have decided to put it aside for now. It just wasn't grabbing my attention. It did sound like an interesting idea and something I would enjoy when I read the description. I guess I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it right now. I do still want to find out what happened to them, so maybe I will come back to this at some point.