Nowhere Island

• Written by Tania Unsworth
• Published by Zephyr books

Tania Unsworth has always written excellent books, books that make you stop what you are doing and think.

She thinks nothing about breaking down boundaries and opening the eyes of the reader.

I was completely hooked by the end of the first chapter, and I couldn’t wait to carry on with the book. This was like nothing I’d read before and I was desperate to see if the children would be ok.

Hidden at the intersection of several busy highways behind the trees and scrubby undergrowth is an island, full of secrets…

Pez has lived there for a while now, enjoying the solitude. She has a vegetable patch, a routine, her own way of doing things and a condor, who may be outstaying his welcome.

Runaway brothers, Riley and Grayson call the island home too. They keep their distance from Pez and spend precarious days trying to survive, still relying on the man-made world which speeds around them.

Then Gil arrives, with his hagstone and a dream of happy families, and everything changes. The four of them find a way of living and believe they might stay on the island forever. But all too soon they witness something they should never have seen and they’re in deadly danger…

This is truly an amazing book, like Tania I have often wondered what might live under  the highways, and what adventures could happen there. The habite often looks brutal and it would be hard to imagine anything living there.

The four characters are great and all different, Pez who has escaped a life in a cult, Gil who has spent his life in various foster homes. And brothers Grayson and Riley who will defend and protect each other for anything.

They become a family and know they have each other.

This book has themes of found families, fostering, social exclusion, survival, the power of the wilderness and human connections to healing.  Tania Unsworth combines these difficult topics with a story that is alive with magical adventures and exciting life experiences.

This book also teaches us that to be a family you don’t need blood ties. 

This is a charming and relatable story. Readers will find themselves rooting for this scrappy bunch of misfits to find the freedom that they deserve, in a place where they can truly be who they are. It is also a place where in a funny sort of way they feel safe.  We get an idea of what it’s like to be a foster child that goes from one carer to another, we get to experience being in a cult and how it affects children and we get to feel what it is like having to run away from an abusive home.

Some of my favourite parts are when they are learning how to live together in the camp. I like how Tania Unsworth has made the experience relatable and shows how they struggle for food, and how the weather affects their life. She doesn’t sugar coat the experience as she makes it as realistic as she can.This is going to be a very important book for so many different reasons.