Qualities of Light (Spinsters Ink) [Paperback]

Mary Carroll Moore (Author)

Book Description

Series: Spinsters Ink | Publication Date: August 25, 2009

An early summer morning, a forbidden boat ride. An accident that puts Molly Fisher's seven-year-old brother in a coma. And Molly's life plummets out of orbit.

Steeped in self-blame, she reaches out to her parents. But they occupy their own elliptical orbits, grief-stricken, distant, estranged from her and from each other.

Into Molly's anguish and solitude intrude two people: Chad, whose awkward courtship meets her even more awkward response; and Zoe, at seventeen a year older than Molly, and seemingly light years ahead in the frankness of her interest and the boldness of her pursuit of Molly.

Qualities of Light explores the budding of unexpected romance in the face of family tragedy, the forging of a new relationship between a daughter and her gifted, difficult parents, and an adolescent girl's confrontation with her own qualities of light and darkness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

How many writers have caught that lightning-in-a-bottle that is young love? And made it glow with all the sweetness, sweat, and anguished joy that characterize it? Very few, I venture to guess, but here's one to add to the list and love. In prose both elegant and spare, but never without compassion, Mary Carroll Moore limns a romance between two eager, bright, and thoughtful teenaged girls. One is beautiful, confident, and athletic; the other is artistically gifted, a skilled observer of family and friends. But both are tangled in family problems beyond their powers to solve. Zoe, the athlete, lives with her sot of a father, having been unwillingly relinquished by her lesbian mother when another lover drew her away. Molly, the artist, takes on heavy guilt for an accident that almost killed her beloved little brother and struggles with the sad prospect of her parents' possible divorce.

Moore never sentimentalizes these problems, but neither does she let the girls lose hope. On the contrary, as their love unfolds, it becomes their fortress. The story, set in lush summer in the Adirondacks, suffuses the young lovers with those qualities of light that illuminate the water, the woods, and the human heart. Indeed, she provides a bounty for all the senses, as we catch the scent of pines and warm muffins, we hear the splash of waves under water skis, we feel the slip of trembling hands over oiled bodies. We are transported back to that perilous passage, so well remembered, through adolescence and first love. This is a tender and lively coming-of-age tale told with delicate insight. Mary Carroll Moore has given us a romance etched in moonlight--the one we all wish we had had in our seventeenth summer. --Ann Bannon

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Spinsters Ink (August 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935226061
• ISBN-13: 978-1935226062
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,253,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mary Carroll Moore spent all her growing-up summers on an Adirondack lake and won her first art contest at age twelve. She ran a cooking school and wrote cookbooks (under the name Mary Harrison Carroll) and a syndicated food column for the first ten years of her writing career. Now she teaches creative writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, The Hudson Valley Writers' Center near New York City, and several other writing schools in the U.S. Over 300 of her columns, essays, short stories, articles, and poetry have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers around the U.S. and have won awards with the McKnight Awards for Creative Prose, Glimmer Train Press, the Loft Mentor Series, and other writing competitions. Interviewed by the New York Times for her multi-discipline artistic focus, she is also a painter and recording artist. She lives with her family in New England.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful new book!, August 26, 2009

By 

Martha F. "Martha" (minneapolis) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Qualities of Light (Spinsters Ink) (Paperback)

QUALITIES OF LIGHT, by Mary Carroll Moore, isn't just a beautifully nuanced contemporary lesbian romance, but a sensitive exploration of the cruelty and kindness--the intricate balancing act--that is family love. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A serious coming of age story, January 17, 2010

By 

Sage320 (Newport News, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Qualities of Light (Spinsters Ink) (Paperback)

It was supposed to be a routine summer at Cloud Lake, but the Fisher family is coming unraveled. When Molly and her little brother Sammy disobeyed their father and took a boat out onto the lake, they had no way of knowing that an accident would leave Sammy lying in a hospital bed in a coma. Their parents' marriage was tenuous at best with their father absorbed in his painting and mother waiting for a chance to take off in her plane and leave them all behind. Instead, her parents are keeping a vigil at the hospital, focusing all of their attention on their son and Molly is left on her own to deal with her guilt, her parents and the strange feelings she's developing for Zoe Novato. Zoe is unlike anyone fifteen year old Molly has ever met - funny, vivacious and not afraid to kiss a girl. Molly's father is distant and her mother distracted, so she has no one to talk to about why she is more attracted to a girl than to Chad who would like to be her boyfriend. As the summer progresses Zoe practices her waterskiing, Chad is confused, and Molly learns to deal with her feelings, both for her parents and Zoe. And they are all waiting, waiting for Sammy to wake up.

Qualities of Light is a sensitive, deftly told story of an adolescent trying to cope with her emotions. Molly's hormones should be raging, but what throws her is that they're drawing her towards a girl and Molly doesn't want to be different from everyone else. She's struggling to reestablish her relationship with her parents, who aren't making it easy, and she doesn't need anything to complicate that more than Sammy's accident already has. Moore shows Molly as a child-woman who alternates between immature behavior and overwhelming maturity as she deals with her family and friends. Those who remember their passage through that age will find much that taps into their memories.

This is a serious, but interesting book. Sometimes it's hard to get a grasp on the emotions that are being expressed, but that may be a device to help the reader relate to what Molly is going through. This isn't a coming-out love story, but a thoughtful look at the process. For those looking for a book with some depth, this may be it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written first novel!, November 11, 2009

By 

Clelie Rich (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Qualities of Light (Spinsters Ink) (Paperback)

Qualities of Light is the story of sixteen-year-old Molly, whose brother is in a coma and whose parents appear to be on the point of separating. One glorious summer in the Adirondacks, Molly learns how to love -- herself, her father, her friends ... and Zoe, beautiful, vibrant Zoe.

Mary Carroll Moore's first novel, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is carefully and lovingly put together. Her characters are rich and fully developed, her descriptions of the setting are detailed and visual and put the reader right there, on the dock with Molly and Zoe, and she captures the extremes of the teenage years perfectly. My favorite scene focuses on a simple fern; my second favorite is the closing scene between Molly and her father. I strongly recommend this book to teens and adults alike.