praying this never happens to me.

Sometimes it freaks me out when the names of characters in a novel I am reading match real people in my life. On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves introduces Anna and T.J. In my real life Anna is one of my best friends and T.J. is my older brother. I moved passed this almost immediately because fictional Anna is thirty and fictional T.J. is sixteen. Or maybe it should have made the idea even more strange. Anyways.


T.J. is a sixteen-year-old cancer survivor who needs to catch up on missed school and is sent to a tropical island to be tutored by Chicago native, Anna who is an English teacher, like me. The two board the private plane heading to T.J.'s wealthy family's summer house in the Maldives islands packing with them their clothes and their own personal sets of baggage. While flying over the beautiful islands their plane CRASHES into the shark-infested waters. Anna and T.J. survive the crash and manage to swim to the shore of an uninhabited island.

If they were rescued right away, this wouldn't be much of a story would it? After months of being stranded their relationship changes as we can read from both Anna and T.J.'s point of view. And maybe you'll see Anna's mug shot on CNN.