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geoffreylittle's review against another edition
5.0
I am currently enjoying this book as much as any in recent years -- it is a rare spot. First Light has an intelligence on par with Rachel Cusk's Outline, and the same nimble narration, often peppered with staggeringly deep human insights. I'm in awe of Baxter; its hard to imagine being such a good writer. I have about half the book left.
blueranger9's review
2.0
I was in a field practicum where our professor enjoyed incorporating literature with our lessons on psychopharmacology and therapy, but he never went over it. In the middle of the story, I doubted my patience in finishing it, but I read the entire book and really really tried to figure out its relevancy to our course. Unfortunately I never did. I tried to go into it with an open mind, I really did, but it was painstaking to get through. I found the narrative thread (done in reverse chronological order) to be slow and tedious. I didn't find anything particularly engaging about the characters, but the dynamics between were nicely developed. The relationship between siblings Dorsey and Hugh resonated with me since I've an older brother I'm quite close to myself. As for the character arc, it was forgettable at best, and I would hardly recommend this book to anyone. I do hear that Baxter's other books are well-written though. It may be worth exploring.
flogigyahoo's review against another edition
4.0
Anything written by Charles Baxter is going to be good. His first novel "First Light" is certainly that telling the story of dull Hugh and his sister, brainy Dorsey. Hugh is a car salesman, Dorsey a physicist. Sibling love is the subject of this intelligent novel. We meet brother and sister in the first chapter, Hugh father of two and his shadowy wife and Dorsey, her son Noah who is deaf and her obnoxious husband, Simon, a famous actor. The novel then does something...well, novel. Their simple, quiet, yet thought provoking story is told backwards. I wish he had elaborated more on the parents, on Hugh's wife, who is a total mystery. Still, backward to the moment of love works.
slugabed's review against another edition
5.0
I must read everything Charles Baxter has ever written.
spoko's review
3.0
An interesting novel. I decided to read it based on a recommendation from someone in an online book group. They said it was remarkably well written, especially in how he developed his characters. It was pretty good in that sense, but throughout most of the book I found the characters to be less than believable.
They didn't mention the novel's central device, though, which is that it's written in reverse. It begins at the death of the main character (Hugh), and moves backwards in time, chapter by chapter, until he is a toddler at the birth of his sister (Dorsey). This is tied pretty closely with the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory of the universe (Dorsey is an astrophysicist), and in that sense it works quite well. That, actually, became the most interesting aspect of the novel for me.
As I said, the characters themselves were often not that believable. But there was something compelling about them. Their relationships were interesting at times, and it was interesting to speculate on what would "happen next"—that is, on what had happened to bring them to this point. But I have such a bad memory that I ended up forgetting details I wanted to remember, which would probably have made it a much more interesting book for me.
They didn't mention the novel's central device, though, which is that it's written in reverse. It begins at the death of the main character (Hugh), and moves backwards in time, chapter by chapter, until he is a toddler at the birth of his sister (Dorsey). This is tied pretty closely with the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory of the universe (Dorsey is an astrophysicist), and in that sense it works quite well. That, actually, became the most interesting aspect of the novel for me.
As I said, the characters themselves were often not that believable. But there was something compelling about them. Their relationships were interesting at times, and it was interesting to speculate on what would "happen next"—that is, on what had happened to bring them to this point. But I have such a bad memory that I ended up forgetting details I wanted to remember, which would probably have made it a much more interesting book for me.
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