Saturday 8 September 2018

When the Lights Go Out by Mary Kubica: Review




Set adrift by the death of her beloved mother - lost in grief and unable to sleep - Jessie’s life is thrown into turmoil. As Jessie travels further into sleep deprivation, things get rapidly stranger. And then stranger still. Is Jessie really the person she has always believed herself to be?

Twenty years earlier Eden, a young married woman, yearns for the baby it seems she can’t have. Eden knows she will do anything, whatever it takes, to have a child. 

The story gradually unfolds both from the increasingly distorted viewpoint of Jessie - the unreliable narrator to end all unreliable narrators - and Eden as she tells her own story in journal form. As things for Jessie become increasingly bizarre I was occasionally reminded of another great unreliable-narrator story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

The ending has come in for criticism, even anger in some quarters, and in some ways I can see why, but in fact it was so well done that I thought it was okay. I kind of suspected earlier on where things were going - there were a couple of perhaps too obvious giveaways - though not completely. In fact I found the ending both moving and satisfying with a real sense of redemption and hope after the often dark and even sinister tone of earlier. 


When the Lights Go Out was an enthralling and very compelling read.

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