by Jean E. Pendziwol

The Lightkeeper’s Daughters follows Elizabeth, a blind woman living at a nursing home, and Morgan, a teen forced to perform community service cleaning the graffiti she spray-painted on the nursing home’s fence. After Elizabeth’s father’s old journals are recovered from a shipwreck, she enlists Morgan to help her go through them, thinking they may contain the answers to mysteries of her youth. In doing so, they start to uncover their deep connections to each other, both embarking on a journey of self-discovery in the process.

The story jumps between the two characters’ modern-day lives and Elizabeth’s past, when she grew up at the Porphyry Island lighthouse on Lake Superior. We start heading back in time by reading passages from the aforementioned journals, and, much for the same reasons I wouldn’t shut up about in my review for The Martian, I didn’t find this to be a particularly effective way to explore the narrative or portray emotions. So, you can imagine how excited I became when, in the second part, the story is largely told through Elizabeth’s first-hand experiences. With the shift, Pendziwol thrusts us directly into the story, where we actually get to live it instead of hearing dry accounts of it, and, as such, The Lightkeeper’s Daughters improved immensely to me by the second part.

The thing that becomes immediately striking in The Lightkeeper’s Daughters is how the characters––especially the two main ones––are brimming with personality, but little niggles related to their perceived realism start turning up as we proceed. I’d largely attribute this to difficulties that come with the author’s choice of point-of-view. Aside from two short chapters, Pendziwol’s story is presented in first-person, alternating between Morgan’s and Elizabeth’s viewpoint, and such a perspective can run into problems when an author finds it hard to separate herself from the author role and convincingly become the characters. This can materialize as characters who are much more self-aware than I would expect real people to be in their situations. I assume this has to do with an authors learning about their characters on deep, deep levels––which obviously results in more fleshed-out characters––and it coming out overtly in the text––which can lessen the realism, depending on how readers experience and interpret the characters. Another way this can manifest is with a character stepping too firmly into her narrator shoes, when I question why the narrator would actually reveal specific details to her listener. I’m actually quite torn about this one, however, because it causes another small push away from immersion, but handling things this way likely results in a better read than a more convincing, plain telling.

Keep in mind that, when it’s all said and done, The Lightkeeper’s Daughters is full of great prose, and Pendziwol has a definite flair for description, transporting us to a vivid landscape that she obviously knows well and just as clearly loves.