First Light

First Light, by Rebecca Stead (Random House, 2007) is one of the best books I’ve read this year with obvious cross-gender appeal. By “one of the best”, I mean not only is it well-written, with an interesting premise and three-dimensional characters, it’s a page-turner. I carried it around with me, just waiting for a spare moment in which to sneak another peek. I’m confident it will have the same effect on many upper middle grade readers, too.

First Light follows the lives of two young characters, Peter and Thea, who live in separate worlds. Peter lives in modern-day New York City, while Thea lives in a time and place we can’t quite pin down. All we know is it’s foreign. Cold. Dark. A colony enclosed by ice, called Gracehope.

Both Peter and Thea are looking for answers. Peter seems perfectly ordinary, except for his headaches, which are accompanied by strange visions. There is, however, the question of his mother’s depression, which seems tied to the red notebook she’s always writing in but won’t let Peter see.

As for Thea, she’s concerned for Gracehope’s future. Her people came to Gracehope seven generations ago, and have grown greatly in number. How will they survive without leaving Gracehope and entering the “wider world” to find a bigger place to live, with greater resources? Unfortunately, the elders of Gracehope, particularly Thea’s grandmother, are completely resistant to exploring that option.

It isn’t until Peter and his parents visit Greenland – ostensibly for his father to study global warming, while his mother writes a book on mitochondrial DNA – that Peter and Thea’s worlds are set on a collision course, and all their questions are answered. The hows and whys are the mystery that will drive readers onward.

The Library of Congress has cataloged First Light as an adventure story, but I’m going to call it science fiction. It’s speculative, involving situations and technology outside current reality. Aside from a touch of prophecy, all explanations are scientific rather than magical in nature. It does have elements of adventure and mystery, but I think it shares most of its appeal with speculative fiction such as Lois Lowry’s Giver trilogy, Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time and Shadow Children series, and – the parallels will be obvious to any reader – Jeanne Du Prau’s City of Ember. And boy howdy, do those books have a lot of fans, many of whom would probably enjoy First Light!

To be critical for a moment, the “scientific” elements of the story were, to me, the least interesting or plausible. Without giving too much away, Peter’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA explanation for Gracehope’s people works for the present-day, but I wasn’t sure why it was necessary for the founder of Gracehope to have known about it as well (down to the double-helix, even!). That, along with certain other technology "invented" by the founder, seemed almost magical in an otherwise fairly grounded story. Meanwhile, global warming provides a compelling reason for Peter’s family’s visit to Greenland, but I didn’t feel the full weight of global warming’s consequences for Gracehope. This is probably because the story ends without Gracehope’s people confronting the truth themselves.

If one doesn’t dig too deeply into pragmatics, however, there’s plenty to enjoy here for both boys and girls, grades 6-or-so and up. I look forward to adding it to my library’s list of recommended science fiction titles and talking it up next time someone asks me, “Read any good books lately?”

Also reviewed at:
A Fuse #8 Production
Deliciously Clean Reads