I have lived a lifetime in The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton. A book I wanted to read since I first saw the cover in March 2022, I was over the moon when I got a review copy of this book from Grand Central Publishing. I have finally read it and adored it and posting it to my blog months after reading brings me right back. Here’s what this book is about:
The Light Pirate
By Lily Brooks-Dalton | Goodreads
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels gradually wreak havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker; his pregnant wife, Frida; and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds to search for them. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.
As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.
Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time—The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.
Content notes include grief, abandonment, loss of loved ones, natural disasters, animal death, gun violence, bullying, pregnancy, childbirth, loss of memory.
The Light Pirate – Review
The Light Pirate brings together the tension of natural disasters with the beauty of life. The book is divided into four parts with snippets of writings at the beginning of each part, musing about nature, time and storms.
The first part of the book was captivating. I loved the different perspectives from Kirby, Frida, Flip and Lucas as they first prepared and then weathered the storm that changed everything. Very quickly, they became concrete people in my mind. I got to know so much about their situation and family unit. Frida’s struggles to connect with the boys, the boys’ need to be acknowledged by their father, Kirby’s job as a lineman and the mistakes he made in the past. It was all expressed so well in the midst of a disaster.
After building a concrete picture, came the pain of the world breaking and the grief of losing people. Frida is not in the book long but the few pages for which I knew her, she was memorable. She had had a hard life, and lost her mother to a similar hurricane. When she met Kirby, she took a leap and found herself a step-mom to two young boys and pregnant with a girl. But when the storm comes, she is forced to bring Wanda into the world alone.
The Light Pirate is a brutal book. Nature wrecks havoc and takes away person after person. Its strength and unpredictability is harrowing and emphasized through the characters throughout the book. The world continues to change and with weather patterns being so destructive, governments start to withdraw from the places around the coast. Few people want to live there and with the population migrating to other places, eventually basic amenities like clean water, electricity, and the internet are all shut down.
Wanda is left with Kirby. Kirby’s long time neighbour, Phyllis, becomes an integral part of their lives and Wanda grows leaps and bonds with her friendship. Phyllis is someone who prepares for the world to end and she teaches Wanda to observe nature, collect data, and keep ahead. As death visits the two of them again and they lose people they love, Wanda and Phyllis become one unit.
What used to be a town in Florida that hurricanes used to hit becomes a swamp. I got a feel of Where the Crawdads Sing movie from The Light Pirate. There are silent and careful boat rides and oneness with nature that I distinctly remember from the movie.
A fantastical piece of The Light Pirate is Wanda’s connection to mysterious lights in the water. Phyllis obviously studies this and loves the new organisms that are starting to show up in the ecosystem as the world and climate change. As Phyllis ages, she starts to forget. At one point, she starts to describe Wanda as a woman because she could not no longer remember otherwise. Watching her grow old through Wanda’s eyes was its own heartbreaking experience.
There are many bitter realities in this book: the pain of losing loved ones, unfinished, empty memories because they passed away, distress because the world is changing too fast, marvel that it is changing, the strength to survive no matter what. There is a cat in this book too!
When Wanda comes across other people who live like she does, she faces the choice of accepting companionship or staying by herself.
I was moved to ugly sobs so many times in The Light Pirate. I would read this book again. The changing landscape and Wanda herself will pull me back to the story. It’s a world so different from mine and yet so similar in some ways. I look forward to writing about this book when I reread it.
If you are interested in The Light Pirate, add it to your TBR on Goodreads. If you have read it already, tell me your thoughts in the comments or link to your review and I will give it a read.
Many thanks to Grand Central Publishing for the review copy for my honest thoughts.
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