THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.
Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.
The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.
Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.
Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.
Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.
The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.
Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.
