My heart....

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS by M. L. Stedman is not a book for light-weight readers. It is important to know going into this book that it is deep and incredibly heart-wrenching. It deals with loss--extreme loss--and not only the feelings that come from experiencing such incredible loss, but the actions such losses lead to that never would have occurred without the deep pain and soul-wrenching sorrow experienced.

I saw that THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS is being made into a movie--or has already been made into a movie. It apparently will be released on September 2 this year. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnBMGa6z-Bg> I bought the book online; it was here two days later. I read it in 3 days. I would have finished it on the 2nd day, but we had a birthday party to go to.

I don't know how Stedman got the idea for this book, the research required, or anything beyond the fact that she was born and raised in Australia (the setting for the novel), she now lives in London, and that THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS is her first book. I normally try to find out as much as I can about the authors of the books I read, but Stedman remains a mystery that I would love to solve. I will continue to research her until I know more. 

I want to know how much loss she herself has experienced. I want to know what research she had to do to write this novel. I want to know how she got the idea for this story. I want to know her writing process--her writing journey. I want to know how hard she had to think to come up with her amazing poetic language throughout the novel--language that speaks volumes that mere words can't convey. 

This is a beautifully written book, but very difficult to read--as one who has experienced child loss similar to that of Isabel. My heart was wrenched out of my chest with the turning of each page, but I was powerless to stop reading. If you choose to read it, go in with your eyes wide open, knowing that the story is gut-wrenching.

*As kind of a side-note, I couldn't help thinking of THE MEMORY-KEEPERS DAUGHTER as I read THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS. Both dads make decisions that impact not only the futures of their families, but the futures of others. Both dads are tortured for many years by that one moment of decision. Both stories in as happy an ending as is possible with such stories--with a reminder that no matter how difficult life gets--no matter what life throws at us--life does go on and we can only choose what we're going to do with our lives each moment. One major difference between the books that makes THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS definitely the better book of the two is that in THE MEMORY-KEEPERS DAUGHTER, the author always told me what to think and explained certain parts of the story as if I was unable to read between the lines. For example, one scene I remember specifically is when the dad goes to a bridge and stands on the edge with his toes sticking out over the edge in the pouring rain. It's a powerful scene, of course, demonstrating the difficulty of the dad as he struggles with the decision he made all those years ago. What ruins the scene, though, is that the author then takes two pages to explain to the reader how the dad was on the bridge because he was considering suicide and, just in case we had trouble figuring out why, she reminds us of the dad's horrific decision all those years ago. As a reader, I love minimalism. I love being allowed to figure out what's going on inside a character from inference rather than being blatantly told by the author, "Hey, idiot reader! Just in case you didn't understand, here's what you were supposed to GET from that scene you just read!"