The Lost Lights Of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford

          The sad thing about this book is that I could see what the author was trying to achieve but it just didn't engage me.  Initially I thought I was going to really enjoy the novel as we hear from three disparate characters:

Chrissie - One of the last occupants of the remote island of St. Kilda.  Relocated to the Scottish mainland after a disastrous and isolated winter.

Fred - Spent one summer on St. Kilda a couple of years before the relocation and is now imprisoned by the Germans after the surrender at St Valery.

Rachel Anne - Chrissie's daughter who remembers little of her brief time on St. Kilda and is desperate to learn more.

The timeframe moves between the 1940's and the 1920's with the odd dip back in to Chrissie's childhood.  At first this works well and hearing from the three viewpoints is interesting as the Historical research has clearly been done.  You get the sense of the remoteness of St. Kilda and the strategies that it's community have developed to survive.  You understand how Fred's experiences after St. Kilda mirror that and how it is being paralleled as he escapes from the prison and strives to return to England.  You see how Chrissie still feels that isolation whilst living on the Mainland and how her daughter is struggling to make sense of her place in the world with no knowledge of her background.

The problem is it never develops past this.  Everything you really need to know about the book is covered in the first 30 pages and then it just became a slog to get to the end, and this isn't a long novel.  It just felt like it was.  Rachel Anne more or less disappears and the story concentrates on flipping between Fred's experiences as he tries to escape using the underground developed by the French Resistance and Chrissie's life on St. Kilda, mainly centring around the time Fred was there.

To be honest I felt like I was being beaten repeatedly about the head with how tough things were just to survive on St. Kilda.  How remote it was.  How much they relied on passing ships for the basic necessities.  What I never really felt was any connection with the characters, they seemed to merely be there as a foil for the setting and that made for the worst of all things, a boring read.  Yes, there is a lot of action and tension around Fred's escape attempts but it is diluted so much that I found myself losing interest.  A real missed opportunity as there are some interesting themes to be explored here but without living and breathing characters it was never going to work and the characters just didn't work for me.

THIS IS AN HONEST AND UNBIASED REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED VIA READERS FIRST.