Review: This Raging Light

This Raging Light by Estelle Laure
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucille's mom skipped out on her and her kid sister, and her dad disappeared after a nervous breakdown months earlier, throwing Lucille's normal seventeen-year-old life into chaos.

I feel very privileged to have read an arc of this book before publication. Like I've been let in on some awesome secret. Estelle Laure hit the feels spot pretty early on in this book and I loved her characters the rest of the way through. Fiercely. Like, if things weren't working out I was going to come in there and help make sure they were ok.

My only problem is, I felt like the world was too idealistic. I know horrible things happen, and no seventeen-year-old should be left to be parent to her kid sister, much less have to deal with the financial strain of keeping a roof over their heads. But the kindness of relative strangers makes me skeptical. I would wish for a world in which this kind of generosity exists, but I don't know that I believe in it.

In fiction, in the context of reading the story, we should be willing and able to suspend our disbelief to take in what happens as inevitable. Of course people step in to help. It's the only possible way that this story could turn out without being utterly heart-wrenching. Except that I didn't get there. I still expected the "man" to step in. And when that didn't happen, I thought "well that's a nice story..." It's not that I want characters (or RL people!) to suffer. It's just that suffering is inevitable. And when fiction conveniently sidesteps it, or dials it back from the worst that could happen, I (and lots of other readers) notice.

Laure's style, the voice of Lucille in this book, was raw and consuming. I felt the feels and I thought the thoughts that were in her head, the head of a seventeen-year-old. More than once I wanted to write down passages so I could read them over again, they were so delicious.

In all, This Raging Light is a well-crafted read that I would recommend to others.



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