I didn't like any of the main characters, I ended up being sympathetic to Hannah aka poor mom who lost the kid, which made it all the more frustrating when crazy woman is constantly shoved in our face.

Isabel Graysmark es joven, extrovertida, hermosa y sabe lo que quiere: quiere casarse con Tom y vivir con él en la isla del faro. Stedman, a spectacularly sure storyteller, swept me to a remote island nearly a century ago, where a lighthouse keeper and his wife make a choice that shatters many lives, including their own. It’s not a bad idea and it might even make a decent film because the endless pages of soap opera chit chat, the bland flowery prose, the heavy handed and unfeasible feeding of tension into the plot’s current and the superfluous domestic embroidery will be excised from any film script. A spot where two oceans met and little businesses sprang up and clung on like lichen on a rock face. You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that and yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters".But when they find out that the baby's mother is still alive and looking for Lucy, Tom grapples with their decision. Moral dilemmas don’t come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut. Sublimely written, poetic in its intensity and frailty…This is a simply beautiful story that deserves the praise and wide audience it’s receiving. Several reviewers have talked about the moral issues of the book but, in the final part of the book when the truth comes out, I found my sympathy jumping from one character to another in quick succession and really couldn't condemn Tom and Isabel for their actions.

I don't know what's with me lately because this is the second book I've cried over this month and I couldn't even tell you the last time it's happened. Their happiness was not complete however, as Isabel endured miscarriages and depression, with Tom struggling to comfort her. But it is also a description of the extraordinary, sustaining power of a marriage to bind two people together in love, through the most emotionally harrowing circumstances. Hannah and Isabel are connected in more ways than their love for Lucy: they both have a penchant for playing the piano. Who would judge a poor man harshly for keeping a bag of gold he found abandoned on a desert island and believed the owner dead?It is during this visit to the mainland when Lucy gets to meet her “grandparents” and is christened — and is also when Isabel and Tom come face to face for the first time with the shattering consequences and profound pain that their decision to keep Lucy has inflicted on others.

This reading group guide for The Light Between Oceans includes an introduction, discussion questions and ideas for enhancing your book club.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It seems like everyone loves to hate on Isabel, but my heart broke for her and then healed and then broke all over again.