She Treads Softly: Bodies of Light

Saturday, July 1, 2023

Bodies of Light

Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down
9/28/21; 448 pages
The Text Publishing Company
Winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down is a highly recommended traumatic and heartbreaking story of the life of one Australian woman. Maggie's life has consisted of one appalling, traumatic experience after an other, starting with her childhood, her time in foster/group care homes and continuing with heartbreaking, dreadful events into adulthood. This is the winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

This is not a pleasant novel to read. It is distressing, bleak, and harrowing throughout the entire novel. Yes, the quality of the writing is excellent, but the narrative never gives the reader a true pause from the feeling of a life of futility and hopelessness. There are brief periods where you think she is going to overcome her past experiences and live a fulfilling life, but they are brief as another horrific turn of events will quickly follow. Maggie does keep trying to cope with everything. The first half of the novel is stronger than the last half.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the Text Publishing Company via Edelweiss.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.