What I’ve Read: The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman
Sometimes a book comes along that is so haunting and so moving that I have a difficult time writing a review that can properly convey how I feel about it. This is one of those books.
If you aren’t familiar with the book, here is the publisher’s description:
After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
When I started the book on Saturday night, I was coming off a nonfiction binge. After reading several nonfiction books in a row I can sometimes have a hard time getting back into fiction. I was wondering if that might be the case here, but I needn’t have worried. I read about 15% of the book that night and once I picked it up again the following evening, I didn’t put it down until the last page was read—two and a half hours later. By the end of the book, Brandon was sleeping soundly beside me and I was quietly crying, a sniffling mess, trying not to wake him.
This is M. L. Stedman’s first book, but it doesn’t seem like it. Her prose is weighty, but still reads effortlessly, and her depiction of the rural Australian coast is hauntingly beautiful. But what she captured best of all were the two opposing forces at work in the book: the destructive power of lies and the unending love for a child. The pacing of the book is masterful—the suspense building and building until I was reading feverishly two hours after I had intended on going to sleep. Even after I finished, I still laid awake thinking. What is a mother? How do you become one? What are the limits on love—love for a child or love for a partner? Do we ever escape our past? Should we?
I was worried how the book might end. I’ve often found that novels that grip me like this one tend to build suspense, string me along and then offer up an ending that feels completely unsatisfactory. (Gone Girl, anyone?) I won’t spoil the ending, but I did not put down my Kindle feeling robbed or dissatisfied. The ending was worthy of the book and was as good (or maybe better) than some of what came before it.
I can’t stop thinking about the book today. I’m struck by how it’s still haunting me, even hours later—and I don’t think that feeling will come to an end anytime soon.
Have you read this book? What did you think?