BLUE LIGHT HOURS

Every night, a college student and her mother reconnect over Skype.

“I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw,” Dantas Lobato writes near the beginning of her debut novel. “I would need as much time for telling as I would need for living.” Dantas Lobato’s narrator, a young girl from Brazil, has just started her first year of college in Vermont. Almost every night, she and her mother talk over Skype about their lives, their thoughts, and the mundanities of their days. This is a slim work with a narrow focus that belies the depth of its own emotion, the profundity of Dantas Lobato’s observations. It is part campus novel, part coming-of-age novel, and, more than anything, it is a novel about the relationship between a mother and daughter. The mother, whose health is less than ideal, has stayed home in Brazil while the daughter ventures out into the wider world—but not without regret and guilt for the mother she’s left behind. “I would give anything to live there with you,” her mother tells her. “Where it snows milk, and even the people are milky, and there’s milk on tap in the dining hall, and squirrels…greet you in the morning.” There’s a quiet lyricism to Dantas Lobato’s prose, an elegance both to her sentences and to the shape of the book as a whole. It’s a work you could read in an afternoon or linger over for an entire winter, finding something new to savor on each page. In 2023, Dantas Lobato won the National Book Award for her translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain. In her first novel, she shows that her talent as a writer is at least as tremendous as her talent as a translator.

A quiet, meticulously constructed novel about a mother and a daughter.