Words leave imprints in your mind like footprints in the sand...
1981, 2000s: This takes you on an actual backpacking tour to Greece from the UK and via France and Italy. The journey the protagonist is on is her journey to Greece and is written in diary form so you really feel you’re beside her. Travellers will identify with many of her quirks and thoughts. We did!
1981 – A lone female traveller, Emma is 18 and wants to leave home in the UK and have the adventure of a lifetime. She sets off on a backpacking trip through France and Italy on her way to Greece but something terrible happens which will change her life forever.
Present day – Kate is the boss of a charity aimed at helping young girls in Africa – her own daughter died and so the charity was set up to help her grieve. She seems to have the perfect marriage, job and life but when her teenage daughter Tilly announces that she wants to go backpacking to Greece. Suddenly Kate is horrified as she has a secret in her past that she has tried to keep buried but now she must face. When someone from that past turns up, then that’s when her life really unravels.
Backpacking in Greece – great scenery, new experiences, meeting new people. That’s what its all about right? Well, it can be, or it can be the worst nightmare of your life…
Emma sets off from home in England and makes her way across Europe to Ikaria. Her route is described – the trains, the struggle with the luggage, the people she meets on the way…
Calais, Paris, Marseille, Milan, Athens
However, it’s when she gets to Ikaria that the adventures really begin…
In fact one of her diary entries starts simply –
“August 1980, no idea of the time. Paradise”
On the top of the cliff is one lone tree. Some sort of oak I think. As it was growing, the wind must have pushed the trunk down and away from its roots.It looks like a giant hand clawing the earth.
When you’re travelling everyday life is very different indeed, normal behaviour is different, lifestyle is different, a sense of adventure is all you care about…
Take yourself to that tavern and sit with Emma, enjoy the freedom of sleeping on the roof, clambering up cliffs in the midday sun and wandering about ‘exploring’. Not forgetting a cup of metrio – a Greek coffee in the national gardens in Athens…
As for the people you meet along the way, those backpacker buddies who can often stay friends for life, sometimes being trapped in a remote paradise near the jagged mountains with a stranger is not where you want to be. Jake and Beattie are not the kind of people you really want to meet – Emma gets caught up with them and they slowly and carefully use her friendliness and easy going nature against her.
Horror always looks more horrific in paradise, right?
Then Kate discovers that her daughter now wants to go travelling and that she plans to go to Ikaria…
Susan: @thebooktrailer
I love books which have dual timelines – in this instance the past is in the form of journal entries – which is the perfect way to access someone’s thoughts and impressions of another time.
Julia Crouch has woven a tale that is both shockingly believable and so close in many ways to what many of us will have or could have experienced ourselves. That is the shocker here -together with the twists and turns along the way, the examination of Jake and Beattie and their motivations is the real chiller here. And the fact it’s set on a sun baked island?
If you have ever been backpacking then you will definitely identify with a lot of the quirks and habits of those in the novel. A joy to remember them such as the random sense of freedom and the easy way to make friends.
The nature of the writing for this kind of mystery was particularly apt for the subject matter as reading Emma’s diary entries was a neat way of thinking as she does and knowing what she is planning to do next or working out what has just happened.
Author/Guide: Julia Crouch Destination: Ikaria, Greece, Milan, Italy, France, Marseille Departure Time: 1981, 2000s
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