Island Nation

By: Peter Heller

Narrated by: Suzy Jackson

Length: 1 hr and 23 mins

Publisher's Summary

A chilling and heartbreaking story of a young girl’s loss and resilience by Peter Heller, the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, The Painter, and The River. 

In this riveting tale of looming apocalypse, Pup is living off the grid for the summer with her parents on an island off the coast of Maine, when all three of them face the hardest decisions of their lives. Across the water one night they can see homes burning and hear gunfire. Pup and her parents, with their goat and chickens and garden and their dog, Opey, have no contact with the mainland, except for boat runs into town. When their friends, two women biologists living on a tiny island two miles away, bring them news of the civil unrest up and down the coast and talk of secession, Pup’s father agrees to go into town with the women in their boat to check on things. It’s a fateful decision that will force Pup to make choices she could never have imagined, and that will alter the world for everyone.

©2020 Peter Heller (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.

You left me hanging. Excellent story line

The ending and middle are not finished. I hope a book is following. You left everything and everyone in limbo. Author started a good human interest story just needs to complete the story.

Half a book?

Why didn't the author finish the book? It feels like I only listened to a sample of it.

Unfinished

I was happily listening and liking the story and then poof it was over with no clear resolution to the situation. Left me disappointed. Other wise would have been really good.

So short there’s no ending?

This is promoted as a short story but it ends with no ending! Will it become a serial? I’d prefer to listen to it as a book with chapters! If it ends here, it is a pleasant waste of time.

Where's the rest??

It took a little bit to get interesting but once I got intrigued it just ended? Hopefully there will be another book to finish this one.

Wait...what?

I was just getting into the story.....and it ended!
Or I should say, it just stopped. It couldn’t be over?

made a good intro for an unwritten book

The plot was good, the narrarator incredible but I felt like I just listened to the first two or three chapters of an unfinished book. A book that I was really enjoying which overall made the whole thing disappointing.

Self-sufficiency is the theme, applies to reader

This is incredibly well-written. In less than two hours, I came to care deeply about all the people in the book, particularly the girl who is the central character. She herself tells us that her parents valued self-sufficiency above all, and that she must be happy in her own company and able to take care of herself. Much as I think endings which tie it all up are great, the whole point of this book is the uncertainty of the times. These two themes lead directly to the last scene—and the reason this story will play on in your imagination long after you can’t remember a detail of all those pleasant, neatly wrapped up quasi-romances you wasted your time on. This story stands on its on, if you are half as tough as the main character. I know I will keep thinking about it for months...way more substance than most Audible Originals.
I do agree with others who say that the narrator’s style does not reflect the urgency of the second half of the story, which is why I gave the performance fewer stars.

It’s not just me...

Okay after reading the other reviews I don’t feel like an idiot anymore. I’ve been sitting here wondering where I went wrong or what I missed. Love the review that says, “So short there’s no ending...” To the author, I have an excellent idea for the story. What you have to do is

Excellent story and narrator but mismatched

Suzy Jackson has a beautiful childlike voice and the story unfolded superbly. But it was like the Archies playing a Led Zeppelin song (sorry for the dated analogy). The magnitude of danger and urgency wasn’t conveyed, at least for me. I actually replayed the whole book at 1.6x speed and enjoyed it differently.
Loved the realism and details (except of course it’s the Little Dipper that’s emptying in late summer). Anna, the girl with the whale tail for a tramp stamp, probably has a further backstory. Hope this is the beginning of a series...