It's December in Colorado, and as I'm freezing my tailfeathers off, I wanted to read about a book set in a much warmer climate - something beachy and tropical, preferably. And this book seemed perfect for that - characters who are in a plane crash and land on some deserted island, where they have to survive and, meanwhile, fall for one another. Yes please!

As a summary of the book - Tyler is a successful writer and Paul's best friend. After a debilitating accident, Paul (who is also gay) was really the only one there for her, so they are exceptionally close - close enough that she often masquerades as his girlfriend at social events thrown by his homophobic boss. So Paul somehow manages to talk Tyler into accompanying him on a five-day island getaway with his coworkers and their wives. One of those wives is Kristin, Paul's boss' wife, who is desperately unhappy in her marriage. Steven, her husband, is controlling and cruel, and Kristin only wants a simple, happier existence. Kristin and Tyler find themselves attracted to one another in spite of everything against their relationship - Kristin's marriage, Paul's job being on the line if it's found out that he's gay, and Tyler's insecurities.

The best thing about this book is that it's short - only 218 pages, and counting the blank pages between chapters, the large font, and the fact that the story itself doesn't start until page 13, it's actually shorter than that. I found myself disliking the characters more and more as I read further along. In fact, most of the characters are actually caricatures of popular tropes, and none of them are done well.

Tyler was okay, but I found her convenient knowledge of survival skills ridiculous. Yes, she writes about a badass who survives all sorts of situations and circumstances, but just because you know, theoretically, how to do certain things does not mean that in practice you are able to accomplish these.

Kristin was a two-dimensional heterosexual woman in an unhappy marriage with a misogynistic, controlling jerk; she has great sex with the first woman she's attracted to and sees forever written in the stars (figuratively). Her husband has stolen her parents' successful company out from under them, so well in fact that her parents are seemingly unaware of this fact. At first, Kristin stays in the relationship with Steven, her husband, because she's afraid of what it will do to her parents to lose that company - but by the end of the book, except for a quick aside about how she'll somehow manage to find a way to support her parents, that concern is completely gone from her head. Really? She's stayed in an emotionally abusive relationship for years because of this, and it's just fixed that easily? Bullshit.

The rest of the company members (save for Paul, whom I liked most of all) and wives were annoyingly stupid. They refused to do anything to help in their survival - all they did was complain about how they didn't have enough food or they actually had to (gasp!) work by standing watch or gathering driftwood. Ugh.

It's not like surviving was all that hard for the group, anyway. It feels more like an off-grid camping trip than a struggle for survival. The survivors willing to work (Paul, Tyler, and someone else whose name I can't remember) were able to save most of the supplies from the plane, so they didn't really have to worry about food - they just had smaller rations. And fresh water was apparently never a concern - even though Tyler found a waterfall in the jungle, they mostly used it for swimming and bathing. Kristin even mentions that they had a good stock of juice (!), water, and other drinks. Seriously?

Most of the time is spent with Kristin ruminating on how unhappy she is in her marriage (and Steven is so stereotypically horrible - ugh) and Tyler thinking about her insecurities and past relationships and flaws - combined with their attraction to one another. Yawn. Even the characters compare the setting, more than once, to a Harlequin romance novel. And that's what it really did feel like to me - there was no real struggle to survive, and everything was solved handily.

The writing style kind of bugged me - the author had a tendency to switch perspectives in mid-chapter without warning, and sometimes I had a difficult time discerning who was "speaking" from paragraph to paragraph. That's one of my pet peeves, and it really pulled me out of the story - that and the horrible characters. Blah.

I really wouldn't recommend this book. ( )