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Many reviewers and readers have commented on Jennifer Vanderbes's
use of remote Easter Island and its geography in her debut novel,
yet few have remarked on her use of the island's name for her
title. A thorough read of this always complex and sometimes
dissatisfying book reveals that Vanderbes chose that title
carefully.

Easter Island, an isosceles triangle of volcanic rock in the
Pacific Ocean, is two thousand miles from both Tahiti and Chile and
one of the most isolated places on earth. Known today as "Rapa
Nui," or "Great Rapa" (to distinguish it from "Little Rapa," or
"Rapa Iti"), the island's earliest native settlers called it "Te
Piti O Te Henua," or "the navel of the world." In 1722, Admiral
Roggeveen stumbled across the island on Easter Sunday, and bestowed
its most familiar moniker upon it. The contrast of great to small,
the symbolism of the navel, and the connotations of the Christian
Easter --- none of this is lost on Vanderbes, who has crafted a
story involving sibling and spousal rivalry, connectedness and
separation, frustration and hope.

The two women involved are the English Elsa Pendleton who, in 1912,
makes a marriage of convenience to anthropologist Edward Beazley,
and Greer Sandor who, in the 1960s, makes a marriage of
inconvenience to her botany professor, Thomas Farraday. We
encounter Elsa as she, her mentally challenged younger sister
Alice, and Edward undertake the physically arduous journey from
London via Boston to Easter Island; we meet Greer as she leaves
Boston for Easter Island in 1973, after the deaths of both her
marriage and Thomas.

The parallels between these women's lives --- particularly the
stunning and painful betrayals both suffer --- would be rich enough
material for nearly any novelist. What makes EASTER ISLAND
remarkable are the other universal mysteries Vanderbes stitches in:
the putative answer to why the island's enormous stone statues (the
moai) exist, the reason for WWI German Admiral von Spee's
disastrous Falklands encounter with the British, and the answer to
the riddle of the world's oldest angiosperm, or flower.

These mysteries, the novel's great strength, are also part of its
weakness: the link between von Spee and Elsa does not ring true,
and it is in these sections where Vanderbes's voice falters the
most. Yet the alternating layers of narrative do offer well-paced
suspense. Surprisingly, the suspense is greater in the sections on
Greer Farraday's doctoral struggles, and her '70s feminist dilemma
sheds light on Elsa's pre-feminist lot. The fact that Vanderbes can
convincingly portray a young Edwardian governess, a
thirty-something modern palynologist, and still offer a realistic
and sympathetic devout middle-aged Polynesian woman (proprietor of
Greer's Easter Island residencial), bodes well for her
future work.

While Greer labors over her core samples, searching for pollen
clues, we learn about Elsa's discovery of her talent for
anthropology and linguistics as she deciphers the rongorongo
hieroglyphics found on the island. Both women ride waves of loss
and loneliness tempered by unusual companions: for Elsa, young
islander "Biscuit Tin," and for Greer, fellow scientist Vicente
Portales. Vanderbes resists the temptation to make the women's
lives identical; the lines she draws between them are more subtle
and perhaps, as she suggests, more beautiful in their
asymmetry.