Bomb Island

March 11, 2024
Hundley (The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First) mashes up Mark Twain and Shakespeare with a colorful adventure story about two star-crossed teen lovers. Fish, a 14-year-old orphan from Atlanta, lives on Bomb Island off the Georgia coast, raised in a dwindling commune by a woman named Whistle. Remaining members include a young man named Reef, with whom Fish operates a glass-bottom tour boat, and an old man who’s been missing for weeks. In Fish’s care is Sugar, his ever-hungry pet white tiger. Tensions flare with Mr. Derbier, owner of a fishing charter, who relentlessly bullies the group for their illegal possession of Sugar and tries to shut down their tour business. Eager to socialize with others his age, Fish begins hanging out with a scrappy group of kids on the mainland and meets a pretty girl named Celia, slightly older than him, who turns out to be Derbier’s daughter. During a party at the Derbiers’ house, Celia and Fish get into a violent altercation with her drunken father, and flee for the island. Unfortunately, Bomb Island is no longer a safe haven, as the increasingly voracious Sugar attacks Fish and decimates the island’s wild pony population. Hundley demonstrates remarkable narrative control as the islanders scramble to outwit the jungle beast they’d befriended and evade the dangerous Derbier. Once this story sinks its claws into the reader, there’s no shaking it.

April 1, 2024
External threats and internal tensions threaten a Georgia commune. Set on a barrier island in Georgia, Hundley's novel chronicles a young man's coming-of-age and the fractious dynamics within a commune. The central character here is Fish, who "had been born in Atlanta sometime in the last fourteen years" and now lives on the titular island as part of a commune. Also present there are wild horses and a tiger named Sugar, and just offshore is the unexploded ordnance that gives the island its name and makes it a morbid tourist attraction. The members have all adopted new names; besides Fish, there's also Reef, Whistle, and Nutzo, and sharing "a name story" with outsiders is frowned upon. Tensions ratchet up over the course of the novel, not least due to the presence of the aforementioned tiger, which attacks a stallion in the novel's opening scene. Sugar isn't the only threat: There's an embittered local man named Derbier who periodically clashes with the commune, and whose daughter, Celia, forms a tentative connection with Fish. There's also the matter of Nutzo's apparent disappearance and a cache of homemade weapons he left behind, which suggests that the commune is becoming more frayed than any of its members would admit. It's a taut novel that hints at its characters' long histories, from commune founder Whistle being haunted by violence and intolerance to a flashback to a time when Reef was "in active sexual relationships with eleven people, all polyamorous women in middle age." The book is unpredictable and often charming, but could use a bit more space to fully explore its complex character dynamics. A look at several unconventional lives.

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April 1, 2024
Though Fish hasn't always lived on Bomb Island, with its sandy beaches and wild horses, it feels like the only home he's ever known. The barrier island off Georgia's coast is home to a shrinking community of outcasts of all ages and interests happy to live on society's fringes. But even at 15 years old, Fish knows his time on Bomb Island is limited. A new threat prowls the island's shores in the form of a white tiger named Sugar, and a member of Fish's commune has already gone missing. Hundley drops readers into Fish's life as he scrapes barnacles off sailboat hulls and avoids local bullies, before introducing a new visitor to the island: Celia, the teenage daughter of a local charter-boat captain. A sharp, snappy novel setting a coming-of-age tale in the untamable chaos of the natural world, Bomb Island moves quickly. Sure to garner comparisons to Where the Crawdads Sing (2018), You, Me, and the Sea (2019), and Raft of Stars (2021), Hundley's nature-rich novel interrogates the thin line between love and heartbreak.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.