I know I can be too much with all my opinions, and my cursing, and I'm aware that my friends aren't always ready for or interested in my tirades about women's rights, especially abortion, and black lives and immigrant issues, or whatever. In seventh grade, Delaney, who's the most tranque of us all, because she takes twenty milligrams of her antidepressant every morning, called me relentless. The word had been on our vocab test. Relentless. Too true. I never shut up. I never give up. I ask too many questions. I'm a contrarian. So I started my blog, This Little Light.
In the near future of 2023, there has been a further political entrenchment of America's alt-right, and in the wake of the recriminilisation of abortion and the restriction of access to birth control nation-wide, rumours abound about the shadowy Pink Market – that works underground to connect women to safe abortion providers – and the even more nebulous Red Market – that has allegedly found ways to monetise this illegally-sourced fetal tissue. Growing up in this environment is Rory Ann Miller: A now sixteen-year-old Malibu gated-community rich kid (who had been in middle school and “just starting to see the world through her gender and to question her default Christianity” when abortion was officially outlawed), and when a super-devout Christian “Crusader” moves onto her street, Rory finds all of her friends gravitating to this beautiful young woman and the fundamentalist brand of Christianity that she promotes. When the Crusaders stage an American Virtue Ball (in which daughters pledge chastity until marriage to their fathers in an official ceremony) at their private Christian high school, something happens in the hours just before the narrative of This Little Light begins, and Rory and her bestest best friend, Fee, are sent fleeing into the Malibu hills, chased by drones, personal 'copters, the police, Crusaders, and bounty-hunters seeking the million dollar price on the girls' heads. Safe for now in a friend-of-a-friend's shed, Rory has access to a laptop and determines to write a long blog post about everything that happened to bring her to this point, and as a format, it works really well. While I don't know if I loved the intermittent, “Oh my God you guys, I think I hear something in the woods”, and then after a paragraph break, “Okay, it was just ________”, overall I liked the urgency of Rory writing the narrative as it happens and the mysteries that are hinted at early but aren't revealed until she gets to those points in her backstory. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In order to remain calm-ish, I'm going to write our side of the story. I'm afraid we'll be tracked to the shed if I post entries in real time, so I won't submit until I know we're safe. This old lap-top has had a long-life battery upgrade, thank God. I could write all night. Maybe I will. Wouldn't be the first time. Won't be the last. Writing? It's the only way I've ever been able to make sense of my life.So, obviously, there is a lot of tension in this plot – waiting to learn what is going to happen to the girls in the present and just what the something was that happened at the ball – and as Rory is a slight outsider in her group of friends (her parents are non-practising Canadian Jews, partners in a do-gooder law firm until Rory's dad left for another woman, who sent Rory to a Christian Academy because it was the best local school), she is able to nearly objectively comment on their shared lavish lifestyle and record how horrified she was to watch this formerly Christian-by-culture group of girls morph into fundamentalists who would be willing to restrict their own freedoms if an influential beauty queen and a rock star Reverend told them it was God's will. This all gives the author, Lori Lansens, plenty of space to comment on everything from megachurches to #MeToo – and especially because Rory is writing in the blog format and trying to record conversations and her own opinions about everything – and This Little Light, as a result, feels completely of our moment.
Because Rory is sixteen, Lansens writes in her young voice, saying things like, “We live in Calabass, California, which is famous because Kardashians.” (This “x because y” is used a lot, and I understand it's authentic to the informal writing of people younger than me, but it's still annoying...but still admittedly authentic...) Rory writes things like, “My menstrual cramps are gnarl” and “My mom would be totally cope”, and between the vibe of the vocabulary and the level of debate (teenaged girls can believably sit around and try to develop their opinions on abortion access and discuss just what kind of message those booty shorts are trying to send, while grown women have opinions based on experience that goes beyond what is touched on here), This Little Light has a real YA feel to it (which is not a complaint, just an observation). If I did have a complaint, there is only one male character in this book who isn't a user/controller/womaniser/moral hypocrite, and in the end, he's too good to be true (and to be fair on the flipside, while the fundamentalist Christians are all pretty evil – hoping to gun down a couple of teenaged girls, for a bounty, in a trumped-up Holy War – there are some characters of faith who do the right thing because it is the right thing – and because they haven't been corrupted by organised religion) . But ultimately, I did enjoy the writing:
It was only hours ago, and with everything that happened afterward it should feel like a blur, but I remember every detail from the second we walked into the ballroom – the twinkling fairy lights strangling the pillars near the stage, the flames from hundreds of candles dancing on either side of the long aisle where we'd stand to take our vows, the bleached tablecloths and gleaming dinner plates, snowy roses in porcelain vases and clouds of pale gardenias on pedestals around the dance floor. Girls in gowns. Celestial. But even before anything went wrong, I could sense a vein of malice slicing through the whiteness of it all, hiding, like a razor blade in snow.So, overall: I liked the sentence-by-sentence writing and the plot tension that the format allowed for, and I thought that Rory was a strongly written character with an authentic teenaged voice. The publisher's blurb calls This Little Light, “an urgent bulletin from an all-too-believable near future”, so a reader's enjoyment might be tied to just how believable and horrifying this particular future seems. As for me, I couldn't quite buy into many of the the details of the plot, nothing that Rory and her friends discussed pointed to something I hadn't considered before, and I had a believability problem with most of the secondary characters. Not really for me.
