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301 reviews for:

A Sudden Light

Garth Stein

3.54 AVERAGE


A very complex story, a little longer than necessary or what I expected. A discovery of the family legacy and a property with very particular characteristics. It is also a story in which the past joins the present making some supernatural events.


(…) In flashes, I see the rest.
Ben carries Harry’s corpse to the barn and lays him out on the workbench. The barn is full of woodworking tools used by the artisans who built Riddell House, and Ben sets to work building a coffin. All night he builds, and in the morning he is finished. He places Harry in the coffin and uses a two-wheeled cart to haul the coffin up Observatory Hill, where he digs a grave. Before he is finished, the rain comes. The hole begins to fill with water and mud, but Ben perseveres, because nothing will stop him. I wish I could help him, as he fights against the crumbling walls of the earth, frustrated, distraught. And somehow, I know that I can. I believe that I can. And so I take up a shovel, climb into the hole, and join him.
Ben stops digging momentarily, looks up at me, nods in acknowledgment.
Together, we dig Harry’s grave. (…)”
sterling8's profile picture

sterling8's review

2.0

While I really enjoyed The Art of Racing in the Rain, I don't think that lightning struck twice for this author with this book.

What's the book about? It's a ghost story,it's a man's story, it's environmentalism,it's Jane Eyre. And what do I mean by all this?

It's a ghost story. It seems that lately there are lots of books around that are trying to update the gothic, and here it's done in the Pacific Northwest. Riddell House (yes, it's that obvious) was built over one hundred years ago, and it has secrets, and it has ghosts.

The environmentalism was actually my favorite part of the book. We get to read about young men climbing as high as they can into the tops of tall trees for the joy of it. The author harkens back to John Muir and his love of nature, and I think he's quite effective at it. He's done his historical homework about the timber industry and the legacy of environmentalists past, and I think I would have liked the book just fine if we'd kept to that.

But it's also a man's story, told in a weirdly inconsistent tone. We go from modern colloquialism to stilted formality and back again in the writing style, and I just can't quite figure out what the author was going for there. It's almost like the narrator just dreamt of Manderly again, but then suddenly he hits his head-pow!- on a beam. The more distant tone seems kind of prissy and overly sentimental, and I preferred the more informal voice which sometimes popped up. What else do I mean by a man's story? This is a book populated by men. We have an absent mother who we learn about through the occasional phone call. We have the narrator's dead grandmother, who may or may not appear and dance in a ghostly fashion in Riddell House's dusty abandoned ballroom. And we have Simply Serena, the narrator's aunt.

And Serena was simply the biggest problem I've got with the book. Spoilers follow:

Serena- what the hell kind of character was she supposed to be? She was Rebecca, she was Mr. Rochester, she was a child, a siren, a victim. As the only female who made a physical appearance in the book, she was a sad disappointment. She tries to vamp our teenage narrator, she's in love with her brother, she gaslights her dad, she's every dangerous woman wielding sexuality as a weapon you've ever read about. And why? This was what I could not get. Yes, her mother died young. Yes, her brother then left for school immediately. Yes, she's a caretaker for her father. But what broke her so utterly? I guess it doesn't matter. When it comes down to it, she's the madwoman in the attic who makes the plot run, and it doesn't really matter why- women be crazy, amirite?

Also, apropos of nothing: Serena had blue nail polish on her toes. We sure hear about that a lot. And in the early nineties, when the book is set, highly unlikely. Fashions were for brights reds and pinks, fading into neutrals, back then. The current trend for funky nail polish was not around yet. It reminded me of the whole "scrunchy" thing with Sex and the City (you either know what I mean by this, or don't need to bother finding out- no big thing).

So, no female characters with agency who weren't also crazy because plot, a haunted house burned down in the end by a madwoman, a narrator sadly looking back upon his tragic youth. Frankly, I didn't need any of that plot. I wanted to hear more about Ben and Harry, the young men who had fallen in love but who were caught in a society that didn't acknowledge their love and a family who expected a dynasty to continue. I wanted to read about their adventures in the forest, their love of building something beautiful, and their hope of preserving what was best about the land. But this wasn't that book.

nancyadair's review

2.0

The Riddell family has a problem. The patriarch Samuel thinks he has a moral duty to fulfill the intentions of his ancestors and let the family estate return to forest as an expiation of the sins of the fathers. The 'fathers' having been a money grubbing, soulless timber baron who decimated the forests of Puget Sound for family wealth.

Samuel's daughter Serena wants to sell the land to developers and take a cruise around the world. Brother Jones is in a trial separation and thinks that money will solve his martial problems. He has returned home to assist his sister in making the old man sell and has brought his fourteen year old son Trevor along.

Trevor has never seen his father's childhood home or met his estranged family. The bright, bored teenager perceives there is something more going on and sets out to solve the family mystery. He is assisted by the ghosts of his ancestors. What he learns is not nice.

When I requested Garth Stein's A Sudden Light from Simon and Schuster through NetGalley I had not realized it was a ghost story. It is also Gothic, derivative, and discomforting. It is a family drama, a coming of age story, and a mystery as well. Have I left out any genres? Romance? Yep. Got it and it's a gay relationship. And incestuous lust. Philosophy, religion, morality, and environmental issues all show up as well. In the words of Tim Gunn, it is a "hot mess."

The creepy psycho aunt and the ghosts were bad enough, but it was the overuse of easy information dumping and plot problem solving that made me put the book aside for a few days as I considered finishing it or forgetting it. I can handle ghosts, if I know it's a ghost story. Finding one secret room with a hundred year old diary that reveals his ancestor's secrets is iffy. Finding another 100 year journal that sheds light on his great-uncle's death is stretching credulity. Finding hidden letters that reveal information that brings about the denouncement is overboard. And all those back stories told by ghosts...

Perhaps had I realized I was reading Genre fiction I would have come at it with a more open mind. (Amazon has it listed under Genre Fiction, Horror, Ghosts. Other places it is categorized under Young Adult, Coming of Age!)

Stein said his original idea of writing about a house turned into a play which turned into Sudden Light*. He also references that it is about father-son relationships. It is a good look at How Not To Father. Both Trevor's mother and his father's mother are referenced but are absent. Which leaves us with Serena, that crazy girl.

There are a lot of reviews online by readers who enjoyed this book. Some mention it's failures or weaknesses. Others related to Trevor's struggle with "manhood" as he dips his toes into the complexities of the adult world.


Stein's previous book The Art of Running in the Rain was a best seller when I read it with a book club a few years back. The story is told from the family dog's point of view. Everyone loved it. Except me. My problem was... it was improbable that the dog could know and understand all the things were were asked to believe he knew.

buddy524's review

4.0

Wow. I loved this book. It was one that I couldn't put down. I fell in love with the plot and there are some moments of beauty. Trevor was such a real voice that he swept me up in the telling of his story. The book is not without its flaws. Serena was oddly written and oddly developed. There were some questions loved it, but still a great read. This would have made a great epic family story. Overall, a well paced character driven story.
dark mysterious medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
shadowsdana's profile picture

shadowsdana's review

1.0

Pretentious.

kplab81's review

4.0

Being a total history nerd and a lifelong Pacific Northwester, this book was right up my literary alley. Stein takes the history of a great (fictional) timber baron family, the Riddells, and unravels it through the eyes of the family's youngest (and most impressionable member), 14 year-old Trevor. Trevor's father returns to the Riddell family compound, the North Estate, after a decades-long absence when his compartmentalized life on the East Coast stars to fall apart. He brings Trevor along with him to introduce the young boy to the side of his family that he has never known. First, Trevor meets the house itself, a massive mansion carved from the timbers that gave the family its name, wealth, and power in the early years of the Northwest settlements. The Riddell history, and accompanying tragedy, runs through the veins of the house and comes alive for Trevor through uncovered artifacts, hidden passageways to long-forgotten rooms, lost diaries that become found, and encounters with his ancestors' spirits. The story grows into a fantastical treasure hunt with Trevor unlocking clues and finding his mission on a day-by-day basis. He's torn between helping his father and aunt reclaim Riddell House from their seemingly demented father to sell off to developers and following the true mission of his forefathers, which was to return the North Estate to the land they looted and pillaged for profit. Stein creates a marvelous coming-of-age tale wrapped inside a historical journey through the early days of the PNW timber industry and the lives of the Seattle elite who profited off of it. My major complaint about Stein's work is the grossly under-represented female voices. The mother figures are instilled with major influence and importance, but are only referenced to rather than given their own stories. The main female character in the story, Aunt Serena, appears flighty and ethereal at first, but becomes increasingly unhinged and unreliable (and overly sexualized) as the story progresses. I wish Stein had made more room in his narrative for strong, influential female voices that would have helped to shape the lives (and fortunes) of the men running the family.
pennyd2002's profile picture

pennyd2002's review

3.0

this was a hard start for me and definitely not a book I would have chosen for myself.
edatrix's profile picture

edatrix's review

3.0

having loved Stein's "The Art of Racing in the Rain", i expected to love this one as well, but unfortunately that was not the case. initially, i enjoyed the book, but the further along i got, the more ridiculous the book got - writing, plot, characters. it ended up seeming juvenile (as in amateurish, not YA) and i definitely rushed through the end. disappointing.
adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

I enjoyed the plot of this book a lot. The narration was not always the most enjoyable to read which lowers its rating a little bit. I like the combination of generation trauma, mystery, and paranormal.