Island of Lost Girls: A Novel

I started reading McMahon books with Night Sister and The Winter People, which have a very different, but at the same time similar element. This is the first of her earlier books that I have read and her style is very evident throughout. Without spoiling, the elements that she added into Night Sister and Winter People have perfected her style. I still enjoyed reading this one though.As usual for McMahon, she crafted an intense story that deals with multiple generations of people and the story weaves back and forth through time. I've read some reviews that say this book was predictable but I didn't find that to be so. I had my suspicions about events taking place in the book, but then she surprised me and threw in plenty of twists and turns. It's so much fun to read McMahon because you are constantly guessing and that makes you want to continue reading. To me, she's the type of author who writes books that I want to stay up all night reading, just so I know the outcome.Even though I really enjoyed the book, I didn't care for the main character, Rhonda. She came off as a weak woman. She flip-flopped her loyalties, and even though she was missing a lot of information, it was sort of infuriating to listen to her piece things together. She was naive and weak and those aren't characteristics that are likable in a main character. She spent her entire life pining away for a man who doesn't want her, has a degree in a STEM technology and yet, blows off interviews. Who's paying for your apartment and groceries, Rhonda?!Overall, it was a very entertaining book and if you can get over the weak main character, it's well worth the time.

I was a big fan of Jennifer McMahon's earlier book: Promise Not To Tell, so for the last few months, I've been meaning to read Island of Lost Girls-- it just never happened until this weekend.About the book....One summer day, at a gas station in a small Vermont town, six-year-old is abducted by a person wearing a rabbit suit while her mother is buying lottery tickets. Rhonda Farr is the only witness, and she does nothing as she watches the scene unfold. The incident seemed so surreal, that she hardly realized a crime was in progress, and that the girl was being kidnapped. The little girl gets into the VW Bug with the rabbit , smiling while the rabbit even takes the time to fasten her seat belt.The kidnapping forces Rhonda to face another disappearance, that of her best friend from childhood - Lizzy Shale who disappeared (13) years earlier. A person in a rabbit suit was around at the time of that abduction as well. Rhonda helps join in the search for the latest missing girl, partly out of guilt for her lost friend.This book was one of those creepy, psychological thrillers, that makes some people (like me), a bit uncomfortable--squirming, and feeling a little hestitant to turn the next page. There were just 276 pages, culminating in a somewhat predictable conclusion. The book was still a worthwhile read, but in my opinion, it does not compare to Promise Not To Tell.

Summary:Rhonda is just waiting for her gas to be pumped when Peter rabbit appears in the Volkswagen Beetle and takes little Ernestine away. She doesn't know what to do she just watches, Trudy the girl's mother is furious that she just stood by and did nothing. She has an enormous amount of guilt and begins to pour herself into finding the little girl. Rhonda works phones at the call center and starts her own detective work to find out what happened to Ernie. Her childhood friend Peter is acting awfully strange and is beginning to look very guilty of being involved in the girls abduction, and the clues Rhonda find just lead back to Peter. All this brings Rhonda back to a time when she was younger and Peter's sister Lizzy, who also went missing, Rhonda wonders are the two connected and what exactly happened in 1993 when everything changed.Review:I have to say I really enjoyed this book, lots of action and a ton of suspense. This is the 2nd book I have read by Ms. McMahon and this book did not disappoint me at all. It is a well written and easy to follow through all the twists and turns. I really could understand Rhonda and the dilemma she carries of loving her childhood friend and not know who to trust. I would definitely give this book 5 stars out of 5.

A perfect mystery that takes you on a million little turns! This was a beautiful, perfect example of misleading the audience and subverting expectations even when they were expected to be subverted. I love the way she paints characters and the honesty and genuinity of the conversations that take place! A definite must read for thriller junkies!

Her books are effing terrible, BUT engaging. They all have a great story, and it keeps you hooked, but then, she just throws a Stephen King-like ending out of nowhere at you and it's hard not to swear in anger.Although I talk smack, I will probably continue to buy these when they are dirt cheap on Kindle because I do like a good tale. I would, however read Gillian Welch---she is pretty awesome. Same sort of story-lines, but much better endings.I think where MacMahon lacks is her ability as a writer to slow down. It all feels like she writes it fast, and writes it before she knows what to do with it, and I can see how not only an Agent, but a Publisher could be easily duped into buying her books.She also knows she can do it---we allow it. Island of the Lost Girls had me hooked from the very beginning to the end when I went, "Wah wah---made no sense", but whatever, it was a decent read for a Saturday afternoon under the covers when my mind felt like mush. All her terrible books are.

I enjoyed this story very much and was delighted with the delivery and price.

Very good story line.

Island of Lost Girls definitely has a thing about rabbits. And submarines - rabbits and submarines. And Peter Pan. Jennifer McMahon however works and reworks these recurring motifs throughout this intriguing and thoroughly readable little thriller, which is as much about coming to terms with the past as it is in solving the puzzle of a missing girl who has been abducted by a giant white rabbit.Yep, that's right, a giant white rabbit. Now anyone who watches movies will know that giant rabbits are never the sign of anything good - think Donnie Darko, Sexy Beast, even Harvey - but even in literature they have certain connotations on account of Alice in Wonderland, and indeed, the use of rabbits here (and submarines, and Peter Pan) all have a lot to do with childhood and childhood secrets, deep dark metaphorical burrows where one can hide from those fears of a threatening adult world that we are not really ready or capable of dealing with.What's great then about Island of Lost Girls is that it doesn't approach the investigation into the missing girl from the normal police procedural and rational gathering of evidence point of view. The novel is not specifically female oriented, but the main character Rhonda Farr nevertheless takes a very female approach, sensing undercurrents and trusting in her intuition - and though she might not always be right in her assumptions, through her mixing of impressions, her dreams of rabbits and submarines, and her obsessing over an incident in the past with her friends and a childhood sweetheart, Rhonda connects to the emotional truth more accurately than any attempt to make logical sense of it all.Jennifer McMahon similarly runs with impressions - starting the novel even from a child's view of the world - while also finding a strong structure that successfully blends these unusual and disparate recurrent elements into something meaningful through the accumulation of character detail and the connections that she forges between the past and present. The case of one missing girl then becomes the case of several lost girls, Rhonda herself perhaps among them, searching to make some sense of the past, leaving her childhood behind and perhaps finding a way to move forward.

We're in small town America. One gas-station and mini-mart, a logging mill, a lake and where everyone knows everyone else--but all hold deep, dark secrets. Rhonda is filling up at the gas station and sees someone in a white rabbit costume drive off with a little girl while her mother is inside the shop. The town swings into action and Rhonda, feeling guilty that she sat and watched and did nothing, does all she can to solve the mystery, about which she keeps having dreams (How I hate novels with dreams in them!) Parallel to the search for the missing girl are events that happened 13 years before when Rhonda was 11. As events turn darker and the finger begins to point towards someone Rhonda has loved since childhood, the two stories merge in Rhonda's mind and she finds herself trying to understand now what she didn't understand then.This a competent novel and an easy read but it's hardly a thriller. It read like something churned out by a creative writing programme. Whilst I wanted to find out what happened and the pages turned, I can't say I was gripped or that I cared for any of the characters. It all seemed too contrived and 'themed' with children's stories (Peter Rabbit, Alice and of course, Peter Pan--to which the title alluded) creating a literary trope running through it. Rhonda's character was particularly problematic for me. She is the viewpoint character (apart from the obligatory italicised sections from 'Peter Rabbit' and a little girl who is not any of the girls who have gone missing.) The reader should identify with her but I found her characterless and colourless. Scenes that should have been thrilling and scary were flat and even at the end, when all was revealed in a 'now let's explain to you what happened' sort of way, it all seemed more than a bit 'so what?' and something I've read so many times before.

On the way to a job interview, Rhonda stops for petrol at the gas station in her small town. Whilst there she witnesses a young girl abducted by someone wearing a giant rabbit costume. She is so amazed at first, and the crime happens so quickly, that she does nothing whilst the child is spirited away. Guilt-ridden, Rhonda joins the search for the little girl, but the clues point in a direction that she doesn't want to take, one that will awaken memories of the disappearance of best friend years earlier.This novel tells two parallel stories of young girls who have disappeared. In the present day little Ernestine Florucci is kidnapped by a giant rabbit, whilst thirteen years earlier Rhonda's friend Lizzy disappears, along with her father Daniel. But the first storyline is ultimately just a device that uncovers the truth about the earlier mystery, which is at the heart of the novel.A lot of the story takes place in Rhonda's childhood, the summer her life was changed irrevocably. Rhonda and Lizzy, along with Lizzy's brother Peter, who Rhonda has been in love with for most of her life, put on a play - Peter Pan. They are joined by a disruptive local girl, Tock, who gradually usurps Rhonda's place in Peter's affections. As the summer wears on, Lizzy grows increasingly strange, becoming obsessed with her role as Captain Hook, refusing to bathe and behaving confrontationally. Rhonda discovers secrets about her family that make her doubt many of the people around her.Although she is the central character, Rhonda is actually peripheral to much of the action, always appearing on the scene too late to stop bad things from happening, or to know the truth. I found her quite bland, someone who lives in the past and struggles to move on. I sympathised with her inability to intervene in Ernestine's abduction, but many readers might find it hard to forgive.This isn't a bad novel, the story is intriguing but I felt that something was missing at its heart. Stories about a person disappearing have the potential to be poignant and moving, but this turns out to be a fairly standard mystery, nicley written but a bit soulless.