After Work - READING BY LIGHTNING

Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas evokes the prairies like no book since Sharon Butala’s The Gates of the Sun. We can smell the prairie grasses overlaid by dust. The wind blows intermittently, fluttering our clothes and irritating our eyes. Inspiration is a private emotion damped down by the dullness of duty.

This is the history of Lily Piper’s father. We come to know him through his daughter's eyes as she grows from a child to a young woman. As with so many daughters, she adores her father and resents her mother, both of whom are good people struggling with the burdens created by their own natures and the external world.

For reasons that are not clear to Lily until she is much more mature, her family sends her to England to live with her paternal grandmother, who needs someone to care for her. The little but well-populated world of her father’s family gives Lily the chance to be a teen-ager with friends who engage in mild exploits for their own amusement. Her responsibilities and love for her grandmother develop her own sense of self, a more emotional kind of independence than is usual in the spare air of the prairies.

Inevitably, Lily must go home. As often as she wished it would not be the case, she needs to test her acquired sensibilities in the harsh world of her birth. In the midst of WWII, it is not bombing nor fear that sends her home, but the draw of family responsibilities and her own compassion.