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Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane; May BOTM
Topic Started: May 3 2010, 01:11 PM (1,013 Views)
elite
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Shutter Island


In the year 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate an unexplained disappearance. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, despite having been kept under constant surveillance in a locked, guarded cell. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on the island, hints of radical experimentation and covert government machinations add darker, more sinister shades to an already bizarre case. Because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems.

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elite
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I read this book this weekend and thought it was awesome!!!!!! :thumbsup

I won't say anything about it - don't want to give anything away.

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mary024
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Sheesh! You're so fast. I'm still waiting for both Little Bee and Shutter Island to come in the mail!
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LOL Well I started the book on Saturday and I couldn't put it down! Plus, it helped that the weather sucked on Saturday (cool and rainy) so I didn't feel so bad for not leaving the house! :)
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Vikks14
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just bought the book last night at a used bookstore, now I have to find the time to read it! Hopefully before May ends.
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mary024
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I should be finished by this weekend, now that my photography final is DONE!
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GWTW1939
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Picked this up last week. I'm looking forward to reading this one because it is out of my usual genre & I really did want to see the movie (mostly because I love Leo, but if I like the book, I'll want to see the movie for other reasons too :-) :-)
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GWTW1939
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I'm about 1/2 way through...like it so far...
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mary024
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Just finished reading Shutter Island. I made it halfway through and couldn't put it down. Oops! I should have been working.

More thoughts later!
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mary024
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I enjoyed this read.
It moved quickly and held my attention throughout. I did spend a lot of the read asking myself "Is this real? Is this person a figment of someone's imagination?" Of course, I asked it about the wrong characters. LOL!

I just can't imagine an entire hospital staff willing to play a role for this one patient. Talk about a risk!

The ending bummed me out. Liked how "Chuck" was there with him.
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GWTW1939
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Finished. I liked it. It was a very fast read that held my attention the whole time. There is a lot of dialog, which made the book move fast. I liked the mysterious plot & enjoyed trying to figure it out. With my psych background, I really did like all the old pscyh stuff. That part was fun for me to read in this fiction story.

I would definitely read another DL book.

I really want to see the movie.
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The ending bummed me out too. I never suspected that he was a patient and I found it really sad that "it" didn't work.

I'm looking forward to seeing the movie too - when it comes out on TMN. I think it ends differently though. My co-worker's friend saw the movie (and did not read the book) and thought that the whole thing was a conspiracy and that he wasn't really a patient. But the book makes it very clear at the end...so I'm thinking the movie leaves it hanging - which makes sense because you'd want people to talk about it.
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GWTW1939
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The movie comes out on DVD on Tuesday, so I will be looking out for it in the next few weeks. I'd like to catch it before the baby comes.
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Vikks14
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OK, so I am behind on my book club books, but the good news is I just finished Shutter Island!

I thought it was a damn good story, even though when I got to the lighthouse scene I felt as if I had been lied to for much of the story! I will even go so far as to say that I felt betrayed, by the character as well as the author. Obviously, I do not normally read these types of psychological thrillers very often. Does this normally happen with these sorts of books, where all that you were led to believe to be true are revealed as a lie and you can no longer trust your POV character? I mean, I know that this often happens to a much lesser degree with POV characters — third person or first, it is a limited view after all, seen through this one person's unique and sometimes biased perspective. Usually, though, there is a bit more foreshadowing or ... something ... to help you see the bigger picture even though the POV character doesn't.

Well, back to the story, I certainly believed he was Andrew Laeddis before he realized it, but I mourned the demise of Teddy Daniels all the same — he seemed like such a good man. The whole unravelling of his dreams made me rethink his flashbacks of Dolores; everything made sense in the end. I already had my suspicions that she was a little mentally unstable and that she'd had a child, from his memory of his interactions with her the morning of the apartment fire.

Weird how even though Teddy Daniels was not, in the end, real, I do believe that all his memories were real. Up to the point of the fire, at least.

The end of the story was a bit of a letdown, but not overly so since my emotional attachment was destroyed after I realized everything I'd read before then was just delusion anyway.

It does make me want to go back and reread several scenes though, especially his ones with "Chuck." I wonder why Lester felt he needed to write "Teddy's" story down. I was hoping there would be an epilogue that would return to the older Lester's perspective. I think I will go back and read the prologue, see what I had missed in my beginning-of-story ignorance.

I haven't seen the movie, but from reading the book I can see why Leonardo DiCaprio was cast. DiCaprio has a way of adding subtle layers to his performance; I've always thought that the man is one of a very few actors who has the ability to display two very different, distinct, and sometimes conflicting emotions on his face at once. Maybe it's the way his mouth twists. Somebody like that would be needed to act out the gazebo/beach scenes with Andrew's wife and children, if those scenes are even in the movie. Teddy seems to be so straight-laced on the outside and so turbulent on the inside, and let's not forget his streak of wry humor. Yep, DiCaprio is perfect for the job!

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Vikks14
Jun 19 2010, 12:29 PM
Does this normally happen with these sorts of books, where all that you were led to believe to be true are revealed as a lie and you can no longer trust your POV character?
I've read many psychological thrillers and I never read one where the POV character was the one who had the psychological problems. That's what made the book so shocking to me - I never expected it.
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