First Light by Rebecca Stead

[lightreads]

First Light by Rebecca Stead

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A little book about a boy who travels with his parents to study global warming in Greenland and encounters a girl from a secret civilization under the ice.



A bit of a disappointment, after her wonderful When You Reach Me. This book is a little younger, a lot simpler; the adults are too competent and the conflicts too reductionist, so a lot of the tension just deflates.



Still, there’s something about the way Rebecca Stead writes. She has a gift for figurative language simple enough to make sense to kids, but interesting enough to also appeal to me. I’m a very synesthetic thinker, so it probably won’t make sense to anyone else, but I think of her metaphors as bell tones. They are clean and clear, simple but pleasing. And when done right, they get me from the chest out.





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