OK, part of my dissapointment with this might have been with the narrator. I found her overly French pronunciation of names incredibly jarring against the American English reading.But setting that aside, the characters in this book are hard to like. Infact, I found myself wondering repeatedly why Madeline would even bother to care about any of them, since they did not. And in the end, neither do I. I kind of hoped the sea would swallow them all up and but them--and me--out of our misery.