Title: The Lighthouse
Author: Christopher Parker
Series: n/a
Lots of heart but misleading and disappointing
I would like to thank Christopher Parker, Beacon Press, and NetGalley for allowing me to listen to a free audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This was a wonderful story about several characters’ journeys through grief and difficult life circumstances. It’s beautifully written, bursting with heart and hope, takes one to the pits of despair and leads one back to thinking everything will be okay.
That’s not what I was expecting, and I was disappointed with how it turned out. Not that I wanted the plot to be predictable; I mean that it’s set up like a mystery and perhaps a ghost story, but it’s neither of those. (Don’t get too invested in the lighthouse, it’s effectively a red herring.) Instead of pursuing spookiness, instead of following leads to solve a mystery, the story becomes a fantastical exploration of “spirit” and soul-searching. Baffled? I don’t blame ya.
Here’s a synopsis to help explain what I mean. Eighteen-year-old Amy Tucker and her dad, a detective, go to a small town named Seabrook, intending to only spend one night there. The dad, Kevin, is supposed to inform the father of a missing person that the police will no longer actively pursue the case due to lack of leads. A secondary purpose for the trip is to get both Kevin and Amy out of the house, as neither of them are processing the death of their wife/mother well at all; Kevin’s drinking rather heavily and Amy’s withdrawn and depressed.
In Seabrook, Amy meets a young man named Ryan and Kevin seems to disappear. Cell phones don’t work, time passes strangely, and a condemned lighthouse functions despite not having the equipment necessary to do so. Circumstances have Amy and Ryan spending lots of time together, growing close. They’re supposed to be attracted to each other and fall in love, but there were zero romantic vibes; Parker is no romance novelist. Amy and Ryan had chemistry, but the kind that made them feel like siblings.
Anyway, one weird thing leads to another, and come to find out, after accidentally taking too many of her father’s sleeping pills, Amy’s spirit has become involved in a “snow globe” created by Ryan’s spirit, which is in denial about the fact that he’s dead. He’s the missing person the police couldn’t find. With the spirits of his unborn sister and Amy’s dead mother lending aid, Amy has to free Ryan’s spirit from limbo by helping him process his trauma and come to terms with his fate; at the same time, she processes her own. And discovers a natural affinity for horses, apparently. Didn’t buy that.
Think King’s Cross limbo from Deathly Hallows, only set in a small Northwestern town instead of in a train station. Plus the citizens of Seabrook functioned like the people who were mental antibodies in Inception.
When they were revealed to be spirits trapped in a metaphysical snow globe or whatever, that was where I lost a good portion of my interest in the book. I was never tempted to stop reading (listening), I was intrigued and invested enough to finish, but I realized the book wasn’t going to be what I wanted it to be and just rolled with it until the end. I had been expecting a mystery, potentially supernatural, about an old lighthouse, and what I got was a weepy exploration of grief and spiritualism.
I was also disappointed that Amy didn’t remember anything that happened in the snow globe when she returned to the real world (for lack of better phrasing). Made everything that had happened feel unimportant and inconsequential. The epilogue was also disappointing; I wanted to see Amy and Ryan reunite in the hereafter, wanted her to remember everything, wanted the story and everything they went through—not to mention the time I spent reading about it—to matter, not see Old Amy get recognition for restoring the lighthouse. At that point, the lighthouse meant nothing to me. Eff that lighthouse.
So yeah, overall, the story had potential but ultimately belly-flopped in my opinion. An elegant leap, triple somersault, and—splat.
The narrator, Braden Wright, was great! My only issue with him was his incorrect pronunciation of the word “misshapen.” He pronounced it “miss-happen.” Maybe it was a dialectal thing, I’m not sure where he’s from. Lol the first time I figured it was an accident, but when he did it again I was like, oh, he really doesn’t know how to say it right.
