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Lucy, a kindergarten aide, has had many failed relationships.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Her romantic relationship with a successful author failed because he was narcissistic and controlling.\u00a0 Her biggest wish, however, wasn\u2019t to have a mended relationship with her parents.\u00a0 Her biggest wish wasn\u2019t even to marry the man of her dreams and live happily ever after.\u00a0 Her biggest wish was to foster to adopt Christopher, a young at her school whose parents recently died in a tragic accident.<\/p>\n
As if on cue, the author of her favorite book series, Mystery on Clock Island<\/em>, sponsors a contest at his home on Clock Island off the coast of Maine.\u00a0 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\u2019s problems if she were to win.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Lucy\u2019s 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.\u00a0 She unofficially teams up with Hugo, Jack\u2019s longtime friend and artist of the Clock Island books to make her wish come true and get custody of Christopher once and for all.\u00a0 However, as she knows from reading Jack\u2019s books, things are never quite as they seem.\u00a0 She must face her darkest fears if she ever wants to have her wish granted.<\/p>\n Why I read it:\u00a0 Gifted to me by a friend<\/p>\n Trigger warnings: unexpected death of parents, emotionally abusive relationship<\/p>\n This was a fun and lighthearted read.\u00a0 It was whimsical and also gave off Willy Wonka vibes at times.\u00a0 I will say that I never quite connected with Lucy as a character, and I really did try.\u00a0 I thought the relationship with her sister was kind of random.\u00a0 I know what the author was trying to do, I just didn\u2019t feel like it was developed very well.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Occasionally they would pop back in and then pop right back out.\u00a0 I wanted to know more about them.\u00a0 For example, I actually liked reading about the other contestants in the game, but we never really get to know them.\u00a0 I was left wondering why they were even part of the story.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for a fun read that you don\u2019t really have to think about, and if you like fantasy fiction, you would probably like this book.\u00a0 It\u2019s not listed as YA, but I felt like it would fit in there better than adult fiction.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"