Amazon.com Review
Some books demand to be read slowly, or quickly; they set their own pace and make their own conditions.
Light, Coming Back is one of these books. A pensive first novel that tracks its 59-year-old heroine's simultaneous passage through grief and new love, it draws the reader into its own thoughtful, deliberate world, where the choice of an after-dinner drink can spark pages-long memories. The main character, Mrs. Medina, spends much of the novel in her Boston apartment, waiting for her celebrated and much-loved husband, a cellist, to die. He is 86, with a failing but still acute mind. While buying some flowers, Mrs. Medina strikes up a friendship with a much younger woman named Lennie, an aspiring gardener who reminds her of a woman she had been attracted to 20 years earlier, on her honeymoon, but had never spoken to. Soon they begin to meet regularly, and the cautious Mrs. Medina has to balance the rise of this unruly passion against her concern for her dying spouse. A strong debut, delicate but unsentimental.
--Regina Marler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Odd narrative quirks distinguish Wadsworth's engaging novel, which introduces a first-person narrator, Mercedes, after she has put herself in a mental hospital after the death of her husband. The remainder of the novel, told in the third person, relates the last months of Patrick Medina, concert cellist, and his much younger wife, who is referred to only as "Mrs. Medina." Her career-obsessed husband has always been something of a demanding child, with demands that increase exponentially as his mental and physical abilities fail. His wife is so entwined in his life that when she falls passionately for Lenny, a young woman, she has no one to tell but Patrick. The lesbian relationship awakens in her a hunger she never knew and elicits behavior that surprises and shocks her. But Lenny leaves; Patrick dies, and Mercedes (surprise?) is left asking if she has anything at all that is hers. Friends old and new offer insights that speed her recovery, and ultimately she senses a future that may very well be her own.
Danise HooverCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
