This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Reviewed by Debs Carr
'My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy.'
Jude is twenty-one and without first meeting the family she’s going to work for on the island of Sark, she flies to her new life on a private plane along with the family’s meat delivery. When she arrives, she discovers that the family had assumed she was male, which isn’t the best start, and she is to share a bedroom at the local hotel with the Polish – by way of Ealing – cook, who can’t cook, Sofi. Sofi is only nineteen and has a freedom about her that Jude envies. Jude has been employed by the Defoe family to teach their sixteen-year-old son, Pip, but he doesn't want to be taught by her. Pip is distant and almost friendless, and he's striving to cope with a father who is barely in the family home and an emotionally distant mother, Esme, who spends most of her time languishing in her bedroom.
As Jude, Sofi and Pip gradually get to know each other over the long summer, they become close and the sexual tension increases along with the heat of the weather. Later, we meet each of the characters as adults as they're striving to make sense of what has happened to their lives and to those dreams and aspirations they’d once harboured back on the island.
The Last Kings of Sark is beautifully observed by the author who had obviously spent time living on the island and getting to know the landscape, light, and also the feel of this small, idyllic place. Sark is almost a character in itself playing the beautiful backdrop to the threesome’s experiences as they fall in love and cope with what life is throwing their way.
An intriguing, almost haunting story that kept me turning the pages and keen to discover what ultimately became of the threesome.
8/10
Rosa Rankin-Gee’s Website