
Lucy, a kindergarten aide, has had many failed relationships. Her relationship with her parents failed because they were hyper focused on her sick sister and only wanted Lucy to donate her healthy bone marrow to help her sister. Her romantic relationship with a successful author failed because he was narcissistic and controlling. Her biggest wish, however, wasn’t to have a mended relationship with her parents. Her biggest wish wasn’t even to marry the man of her dreams and live happily ever after. Her biggest wish was to foster to adopt Christopher, a young at her school whose parents recently died in a tragic accident.
As if on cue, the author of her favorite book series, Mystery on Clock Island, sponsors a contest at his home on Clock Island off the coast of Maine. He selects the contestants using careful criteria (each of the adult contestants had once run away to Clock Island as children to escape their own troubled lives) and promises an amount of money that would solve all of Lucy’s problems if she were to win. She is chosen as a contestant, and she travels from the west coast to the east coast and ferries out to Clock Island where she meets the other contestants and is reunited with Jack, the author and the true mastermind of riddles and puzzles that begin as fiction in his books and blend into real life aspects of the competition.
Lucy’s wit and resilience is put to the test during her time on Clock Island and, just when she thinks her chances of winning are all but gone, Jack throws in a twist that keeps her hopes alive. She unofficially teams up with Hugo, Jack’s longtime friend and artist of the Clock Island books to make her wish come true and get custody of Christopher once and for all. However, as she knows from reading Jack’s books, things are never quite as they seem. She must face her darkest fears if she ever wants to have her wish granted.
Why I read it: Gifted to me by a friend
Trigger warnings: unexpected death of parents, emotionally abusive relationship
This was a fun and lighthearted read. It was whimsical and also gave off Willy Wonka vibes at times. I will say that I never quite connected with Lucy as a character, and I really did try. I thought the relationship with her sister was kind of random. I know what the author was trying to do, I just didn’t feel like it was developed very well. It ends up being a pretty big part of the story, and I felt like it could have been developed more in the first half of the book. I also felt like some of the characters were popcorn characters meaning that the author introduced them and then they would just pop right on out of the story. Occasionally they would pop back in and then pop right back out. I wanted to know more about them. For example, I actually liked reading about the other contestants in the game, but we never really get to know them. I was left wondering why they were even part of the story.
If you’re looking for a fun read that you don’t really have to think about, and if you like fantasy fiction, you would probably like this book. It’s not listed as YA, but I felt like it would fit in there better than adult fiction.