Island of Secrets

 
The island in question is Crete, with narratives set both in the present day and earlier during World War II and into the 1960s.

Angie (Angelika) lives in England and is planning her wedding to Nick. Her big dream is to have all her family there but her mother Poppy has been estranged from her Cretan family for decades and refuses to explain why. Angie decides to visit Crete and see if she can bring about a reunion but no-one in her ancestral village of Amiras wants to tell Angie what happened and it’s an ongoing battle to get her relatives to open out.

As she works hard at breaking down the defences, her grandmother, Maria, relents and begins by telling her the story of what happened in Crete during World War II and the atrocities committed by the Nazis, although the reasons for Poppy’s departure many years later take much longer to establish.

This is a slow burn of a book as it switches between the past and the present revealing secrets one by one and ultimately the reasons for a devastating family feud. The earlier chapters detailing the confronting tragedies of World War II are strongly written and feel authentic as they are largely based on fact (as shown in the author’s notes at the end). However, the last third of the story set in contemporary times descends into a soap-opera plotline that is both implausible and labyrinthine. (Perhaps it comes with the territory as Crete is the site of the famous original Labyrinth of King Minos at Knossos.)

The inter-related Greek characters all have similarities with their stereotypical fiery temperaments and keeping track of who’s who can be tricky. Angie gets tiresome as she bustles about trying to force revelations from her mother and others, all of whom would rather let sleeping dogs lie. She admits to herself early on that she leads an easy, shallow and self-absorbed life compared to the stoicism and endurance of her family, but this gets repeated far too often. The ending turns into such a farce that it diminishes the exceptional telling of the earlier World War II story which is powerful enough to have been the basis of a thrilling novel in its own right.

(This book starts out so well before deteriorating into light-weight fluff that giving an overall star rating is difficult. Four stars for the excellent serious chapters based on truth, one star for the rest.)


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