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lizzillia 's review for:
Days of Light
by Megan Hunter
This is a gorgeous novel full of lyrical prose and characters that sit beside you. It is a novel about motherhood, loss, love and spirituality and takes place over 6 days across 6 decades. Each day we visit to is Easter, the beginning of spring with its sense of renewal. We start on Easter Sunday 1938 for a family party and our main character is 19 year old Ivy. Ivy’s family are loosely based upon the Bloomsbury Group. Her mother, Marina, is an artist living with her lover Angus, also an artist. Her father, Gilbert, lives close by and has a string of female companions. Ivy’s aunt and uncle are also present and these two are writers, Genevieve is a novelist and her husband a playwright. Adding to the group are Ivy’s elder brother, Joseph who is in his second year at Oxford and his girlfriend, Frances, who at the beginning of the novel is yet to arrive. And then there is Bear, the nickname given to a family friend, Rupert. A tragedy occurs on this day and it is a day that never leaves Ivy, not only because of the loss that she suffered, but also on that day she saw a light, a light that she has never been able to describe only to say that it was so different from any light she had ever seen. The motif of light is a thread throughout the novel when we meet Ivy again in 1944, 1956, 1965 and 1999 and the light that she experiences from lightning to flames seems to transform her. There is a sense of faith, of spirituality as Ivy finds her way through the decades and her understanding of this light comes to her at last in 1999. The cover is reminiscent of the Dutch old masters that focussed upon light and light is something that both Marina and Angus try to capture in their art. There is also the theme of motherhood, Ivy’s relationship with her mother and her own relationship with her own daughters, and then there is love. A novel that is about the life that Ivy lived, the choices she made, her faith and her own self-discovery, and a novel about the lives we all live as we try to work out our place in the world and how moments can change our trajectory. A lovely read.