The Wide Starlight
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The Hazel Wood meets The Astonishing Color of After in this dreamy, atmospheric novel that follows sixteen-year-old Eli as she tries to remember what truly happened the night her mother disappeared off a frozen fjord in Norway under the Northern Lights.
Never whistle at the Northern Lights, the legend goes, or they'll sweep down from the sky and carry you away.
Sixteen-year-old Eline Davis knows it's true. She was there ten years ago, on a frozen fjord in Svalbard, Norway, the night her mother whistled at the lights and then vanished.
Now, Eli lives an ordinary life with her dad on Cape Cod. But when the Northern Lights are visible over the Cape for just one night, she can't resist the possibility of seeing her mother again. So she whistles--and it works. Her mother appears, with snowy hair, frosty fingertips and a hazy story of where she's been all these years. And she doesn't return alone.
Along with Eli's mother's reappearance come strange, impossible things. Narwhals swimming in Cape Cod Bay, meteorites landing in Eli's yard, and three shadowy princesses with ominous messages. It's all too much, too fast, and Eli pushes her mother away. She disappears again--but this time, she leaves behind a note that will send Eli on a journey across continents, to the northern tip of the world:
Find me where I left you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lesperance gusts through parental loss, Norwegian folktales, and one's perception of others in this mourning-laced magical realist debut. Ten years prior to the start of the book, Eline's mother Silje—who raised Eline on stories and an unpredictable winter magic they shared—called down the Northern Lights and disappeared, abandoning Eline near their icy Svalbard hometown, "a tiny archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole." Now, Eline, 16 and living with her marine biologist father on Cape Cod, finds a mysterious letter asking her to call Silje down from the sky. But Silje's emotionally fraught return warps reality: meteorites fall, narwhals strand in the harbor, and three strange, cloaked girls haunt Eline's footsteps. When Silje disappears again to right things, Eline follows her back to arctic Svalbard—and must face Silje's mythic creatures, the complex truth of her family, and her lifelong grief. Though Lesperance gestures at rich subjects, including losing a bicultural Norwegian American heritage, the impact of unhappy childhoods, and understanding others' flaws, the themes' development and interconnection suffers amid frenetic, genre-bending pacing. Even so, this uneven but promising debut is clear-eyed on the intricacies of family. Ages 12–up.
