Review of the Day: First Light (Part One)

Two kids. Two lives. First of all you have Peter. He’s happy enough living in New York City, but when his dad informs the family that they’re taking some months off to join him on his expedition to Greenland, the kid is seriously excited. It’s a pity that he’s been getting these headaches though. They’re not serious or anything, but once in a while Peter finds that if he looks at something far away he can suddenly zoom in on it like there’s a telescope inside of his eyes. That problem has nothing on Thea’s, though. Thea lives in Gracehope, a civilization of ice, skating, and dogs. Her home is in the center of a glacier and it is there that her people have survived for hundreds of years, purposefully hiding from the outside world. Thea is convinced that there must be a way out of Gracehope since the population is booming and supplies are running low. Unfortunately, her grandmother (and ruler of Gracehope) forbids any research into the matter. Yet soon enough Thea takes a chance and runs into Peter, leading to the discovery that their lives and pasts are oddly and inexorably linked.

Quite frankly, I just liked the writing. It’s interesting and to the point without forgetting to get a little descriptive now and again. For example, when Peter considers his father’s experience in the Arctic as opposed to his scholarly methodical university self, it occurs to the kid that being the son of such a man, "was a little like living with Clark Kent but never once getting to meet Superman." Larger overarching themes are treated with a similarly deft hand. I liked Stead’s handling of Peter’s mother’s depression. It’s a difficult topic, and it would be all too easy to turn his mom into a villain when she’s not feeling well. Instead, you have the distinct sense that she really can’t help getting whapped with a bad bout once in a while. In terms of readability, "First Light" will not bore your average middle grade child reader. It has a firm enough grasp on its own private world to convince you that what happens in Gracehope could happen anywhere.

I do not write fiction, but if I were to hazard a guess at what it is like to write a work of science-fiction as opposed to a work of fantasy, I would have to suspect that science-fiction was the harder row to hoe. After all, you need to place your world firmly in fact, and that means research. In Ms. Stead’s case it would have meant the research of the Arctic, DNA, ice, global warming, and who knows what else. Little throw away lines like, "It was against the law to bring dogs into Greenland – the Inuit wanted to keep their breed pure…" smack of the truth. Ditto the rumor that hidden somewhere in Greenland is, "a road on the ice cap built in secret by Volkswagen as a private test site for new cars." Sometimes convincing your reader that they’re in another world requires a realistic infusion of real facts. Lose your details, lose your readers. That’s why Peter’s superhuman abilities that emerge throughout the book don’t become superfluous. Not only does Stead ground them in fact but she also works them into an overriding theme concerning Peter’s mother’s job.