Review: Flower Island – Suzanne Vermeer
Pien’s mother passed away six months ago and Pien is in a lot of trouble. She needs a change of scenery and decides to go on holiday with her friend Leonor. While they are thinking about a destination, Pien finds a mysterious letter from Madeira among her mother’s mail. The letter is sufficient reason to decide to go to the green flower island of Madeira. That’s where the secrets pile up.
On Madeira, Pien searches for her past. The letter from Madeira caused Pien to look for documents from the past. In the safe of her mother’s house, Pien found photos that she did not recognize and she started to doubt her origins. Who was her father and who was her mother? The search in Madeira is not going without a hitch. It is difficult to find information about something that happened forty years ago and not everyone is happy when Pien and Leonor come to dig into their personal lives. This produces some exciting moments.
Flower Island is the most recently published book by Suzanne Vermeer and was published in April 2024. As you probably know, Suzanne Vermeer is the pseudonym of author Paul Goeken, who died in June 2011. In consultation with his family, it was decided to continue Suzanne Vermeer’s books. Suzanne Vermeer is known as a thriller author. A thriller is a story that emphasizes action and danger. You may wonder to what extent that is entirely true Flower Island. The book has tense moments, but seasoned thriller readers will Flower Island at most call it a thriller in the light category.
The writing style is not always pleasant. The dialogues sometimes have very long monologues from the main characters. Here they give you as a reader some extra background information and the author clearly did not want to tell this outside the monologues. As a result, the dialogues do not always appear natural. In addition, the author gets lost from time to time in descriptions and unnecessary information. For example, the fact that Pien’s mother lived on the Zwolseweg in Deventer is nice to know, but that nearby in real life a murder has taken place adds little or nothing to the story. Instead, Vermeer might have been better off wrapping up that last loose end in the plot.
All this does not alter the fact that the book is entertaining and easy to read. It’s nice that the main characters are two single women of forty years old who have their lives in order and are not exactly looking for a relationship. The story is built around a clear plot and is fairly predictable, but fortunately it does have a few surprising twists. Flower Island is really a book to take with you on holiday, preferably to Madeira of course, so you can read carefree and relaxed in the sun.
