The Islanders Review (Lewis Robinson)

Cover of “The Islanders” by Lewis Robinson. Image taken from the Island Port Press website.

In the last few days of having a remotely functioning adult in the White House, I decided it was time for a new book to read. It would serve as a distraction from the TikTok shenanigans that I talked about in yesterday’s post. So I went to my local bookstore as usual and purchased The Islanders. It was a new release, they said, that was quite popular and very thought-provoking.

The Islanders centers around Walt McNamara, a high school hockey star-turned high school dropout who joins a leadership program on Maine’s fictional Whaleback Island. This island contains a golf club and mansions for the ultra-wealthy, along with some pristine wilderness. Right away, I knew that class conflict was going to be a key theme of the story (which was also evidenced by the summary on the back cover).

I’ve visited a couple of islands in Maine - I’m from Massachusetts, after all. On many of these islands, there are “summer colonies” where people from other states own property. This can lead to gentrification, which isn’t just an important aspect of that show Yellowstone, but is also present in Lewis Robinson’s novel. Very often, locals are priced out of island life, and this leads to tension between those who live there year-round and those who enjoy the pleasant summers but avoid the cold, isolating winters.

In many ways, The Islanders is a coming-of-age novel. That’s right, all fifty participants of the leadership program on Whaleback Island (one from every state) are roughly 19 years old. They’re navigating what it means to grow up, and part of the leadership program is to develop self-reliance because “the people who settled this island knew how to fend for themselves.” There’s also commentary about class and how heirs of “old money” families didn’t really earn their wealth, but that’s a subject for later in this review.

Poetry is invoked frequently, as are the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Walt frequently mentions that he feels in tune with nature, like he belongs on this island, by virtue of partaking in the grueling physical activity mandated by the program’s leaders. 

The characters fight sometimes, but they also fall in love, and I was startled by just how willing these 19-year-olds were to strip down in front of each other. Maybe I’ve lived a sheltered life, admittedly, but these were the horniest young men and women I’ve read about in a while. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable being naked around so many strangers, but often these characters don’t wear bathing suits during their morning swims in the very cold Maine ocean. Isn’t it FREEZING? Of course, it could always be worse.

Calvin (from Bill Watterson’s “Calvin & Hobbes”) showing us a way swimming could be worse.

And speaking of being horny, you could just tell by the writing style that the narrator is in his late teens. I don’t know how old Lewis Robinson is, but he was clearly able to put himself in the mindset of a 19-year-old boy with raging hormones and the mouth of a sailor. There were plenty of brief passages where the profanity made me chuckle.

As stated above, a key element of this story is class conflict. Throughout the story, the wealthy Club members are portrayed as the antagonists, and the young men and women taking part in the WILD program speak of these members with disdain. I will say, though, that the class conflict took a while to get started; I was halfway through the book and it had barely even been discussed up to that point. There were other hints at it, though, like the use of the word “thoroughbred” to describe rich white “authentic” Maine residents. Fortunately, this display of nativism is condemned by most of the novel’s characters.

Although it’s hinted that this book is set in the early 2000s (as the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore is implied to have recently occurred), it felt incredibly timely. The overlords of the Whaleback Island club frequently admire a group of wealthy ranchers in Montana who fatally shot intruders. This event is never shown in the story, only mentioned, but it made me think about how vigilante justice has been embraced with increasing frequency in the United States.

Look at Kyle Rittenhouse. He drove across state lines to a protest he had no business being in, created a situation where he could claim he feared for his life, and literally got away with murder. Even before he was acquitted on all charges, the right-wing made him a celebratory hero of self-defense. His life now is incredibly sad, though perhaps not as sad as it should be - he should be in prison! And this continued celebration of Rittenhouse means that people are going to be rightfully afraid of protesting Trump’s second presidency.

The left isn’t immune to embracing vigilantes; look at the recent fawning over Luigi Mangione after he assassinated a health insurance executive. I’m not trying to draw a moral equivalence between these two cases, but I am trying to illustrate that people are frustrated with the status quo, and this novel touches upon that quite effectively.

One of many Luigi Mangione memes circulating around the Internet. This one is from Oladino’s website.

Now, a content warning is in order. At one point in the novel, there’s an incident of gun violence (with multiple AR-15s) that catches readers completely off-guard. Like, it comes almost out of nowhere, like all too many of the high-profile shootings in recent American history. But there’s something else I found notable about this scene.

Despite how horrific and traumatic such an event is, I feel like the shooting is barely mentioned again after a few pages. It’s memory-holed, just like all too many mass shootings have been within days or weeks of the tragedy. So if mentions of gun violence are triggering to you, I would recommend against reading the novel. (For the record, the author has stated the novel was inspired by the youth activists who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018).

There are two main things I didn’t like about the novel. One is that the scenes kept yo-yoing back and forth between Whaleback Island and Walt’s previous life in New Hampshire. At the time, I didn’t really enjoy the shift in perspectives, because I wanted to read about the WILD program, not what happened before it when it didn’t appear relevant to the story. I will promise you, though - it does pay off later. So maybe I shouldn’t hate it too much, but at the time it did feel like I was repeatedly being torn out of the present. 

The other criticism I hold against The Islanders is that the ending felt somewhat rushed. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to just tell you how the ending is rushed; it just is. The book was 304 pages long, and I think it could have done with maybe 40 more pages. Given that most novels these days are in the 300s in terms of pages, I don’t think it would have been an unreasonable ask to pad it out a little. We needed more time for everything to be resolved.

Overall, The Islanders was a pretty good book with which to occupy the last three days. It made me quite conscious of my privilege as a white man with a very comfortable upbringing, and the social commentary surrounding America’s youth resonated with me. However, the book’s pacing and rushed ending prevents it from being one of my favorites. Again, though, it’s okay at the end of the day. Better than okay. I’ll give The Islanders a score of 8/10.