THE LIGHTKEEPER’S DAUGHTER

“There was blood and pain, an anguished scream, and the wind howled and shook at the walls . . . ‘And now,’ said Murray, with great earnestness, ‘it’s clear sailing from here.’ ” But after Elizabeth’s birth, it wasn’t easy for the family of four living their insular lives on Lizzie Island on the north coast of British Columbia. Fourteen-year-old Alastair drowns, his younger sister leaves the island and returns with a child three years later to the “brooding, shrunken world” her parents exist in. It’s a beautiful world full of the majesty of nature that Murray delights in explaining to his wife and children. But how did Alastair come to drown? Who is to blame? And why the guilt? The story is told in alternating points of view with flashbacks and diary entries woven so seamlessly into the narratives that the past is clearly always part of the present, a past with a mysterious grip on the present relationships of parents, daughter, and granddaughter. Not so much a plot as an accumulation of memories, the story unfolds layer by layer. The island that is paradise for Murray is a prison for his son, and Murray realizes too late that “It’s Eden, right enough: full of beauty and knowledge, a fine place to start from. But I suppose there’s always a time for leaving.” A beautifully written story of light and dark, of magic, ghosts, tempests and shipwrecks, and of sadness and letting go. A must-read for lovers of tales rich in setting, atmosphere, and human understanding. (Fiction. YA)