Emily, a twenty-four-year-old dancer and choreographer, confronts her husband's fixation with right-wing Catholic dogma that condemns her use of birth control. His faith is so powerful that he refuses to have sex with her, even though he desperately wants to. As awful as this broken faith feels, she is troubled more by her best friend's losing fight with cancer, and seeks to help her friend's grief-stricken, precocious, son-the seventeen-year-old David.But the boy's willful ways turn the tables on her. Denied intimacy by her husband, the boy's passion asserts itself, and everyone's life is explosively altered. Twenty years later, the successful David, a theater director, gets his hands on Emily's secret journals and uncovers her covert emotional life, revealing family secrets unknown to him, and discovering prickly truths about himself.
Part literary memoir, part poignant psychological drama, this haunting love story explores the secrets of attraction and the mysteries of obsession-a boy's coming-of-age, and one woman's search for love and success in a year of intense achievement and painful loss.
*May Contain Spoilers*
Morning Light by Holland Kane is an unexpected religious romance full of discovery, doubt, and deep secrets. David tells the story as an outsider, twenty years after it happened, though he plays a large part in the plot. When Emily, the main character, gives David her journals from the past, he shares them with the reader, adding insight and details from his point of view.
Emily is a hopeful dancer who lets infatuation and love carry her through life. She's completely in love with her husband, but when he removes sexuality from their marriage it condemns Emily to searching for physical love with David, a seventeen year old. Though Emily isn't open in life - she's in fact very secretive - she's open with readers. As David shares her journal entries, readers become members of Emily's inner mind. Readers will connect with her through empathy and understanding. As a young woman, she yearns for life lasting love.
The novel is set up as a memoir, though it's easy to forget while reading that the narrator is looking back while telling the story. Readers follow Emily through a year that held her defining moments. She becomes pregnant, her dance/choreography career takes off, all while trying to hold her marriage together. Though religion plays a huge role in the story line, it isn't overwhelming. It's a common thread throughout that holds the pieces and players together. When the weight of the characters become to much, the thread snaps and the story crumbles into chaos.
Morning Light is a hindsight novel where the worst outcome is always on the horizon. A ploy of Murphy's law that will leave readers feeling inept.
Rating: 3/5 Cups
