Books I've read: Bodies of Light

 

This was one of the first books I read while I was on holiday and it certainly kept me gripped all the way through!

Taking place across a range of time periods, the book begins in the present when Maggie receives a random Facebook message from someone from her past.  A past she has worked hard to escape.  As this old friend persists in contacting her, Maggie is forced to re-examine her past and the trauma that has led her to this point.

After her father was imprisoned while she was a small child, Maggie grew up in a series of foster and group homes, some better than others.  Her last foster mother believed in her enough that she began to think she was someone who could go to university, someone who actually could make a place for herself in this world.

But after her foster mother has a stroke and Maggie winds up in another terrible group home, her dream of university begins to waver.  But she pushes through and makes it in.  She feels out of place there though and even her new friends are not enough to keep her from drowning in this strange new environment.  A breakdown puts the final nail into that dream and she winds up leaving town with nothing.

It takes time, but in a small town she begins to build a new life for herself.  She finds new friends and even meets a guy she thinks she could fall in love with.  When they are married, she begins to think her life might just turn out okay despite her rough start.  But tragedy seems to follow her and just when she is at her happiest, it strikes again, and again and again.

With the law on her heels, she escapes Australia and reinvents herself in New Zealand.  She meets a man there who asks her to come with him back to the States.  Once again Maggie starts to believe she might have found happiness. But without being able to share the darkest parts of her past, her new relationship crumbles like so many others beforehand and sends her spiralling into her darkest place yet.

But Maggie is a survivor, and despite all the darkness and despair, she manages to somehow reinvent herself again and to keep moving through the world.

This was a heavy book.  Don't read it if you are sensitive to things like child abuse or dead babies because there is plenty of both.  Yet even in the darkness, there was something really intriguing and fascinating about observing this person who somehow manages to rise above it and succeed in life despite it.

It's beautifully written and observed and I particularly enjoyed seeing New Zealand and parts of Australia I know well  through the protagonist's eyes.

So I recommend it, albeit with warnings to those who may be more sensitive to certain things than I tend to be.

But don't just listen to me. Here's the blurb:

So by the grace of a photograph that had inexplicably gone viral, Tony had found me. Or: he’d found Maggie.

I had no way of knowing whether he was nuts or not; whether he might go to the cops. Maybe that sounds paranoid, but I don’t think it’s so ridiculous. People have gone to prison for much lesser things than accusations of child-killing.

A quiet, small-town existence. An unexpected Facebook message, jolting her back to the past. A history she’s reluctant to revisit: dark memories and unspoken trauma, bruised thighs and warning knocks on bedroom walls, unfathomable loss.

She became a new person a long time ago. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light?

This epic novel from the two-time Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year is a masterwork of tragedy and heartbreak—the story of a life in full. Sublimely wrought in devastating detail, Bodies of Light confirms Jennifer Down as one of the writers defining her generation.