Blue light hours A novel

Bruna Dantas Lobato

Book - 2024

"From the National Book Award-winning translator, an atmospheric and wise debut novel of a young Brazilian woman's first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders. In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: What's the news? Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international s...tudents, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings. Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else"--

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FICTION/Dantaslo Bruna
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1st Floor New Shelf FICTION/Dantaslo Bruna (NEW SHELF) Due Nov 27, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Novels
Published
New York : Black Cat 2024.
Language
English
Main Author
Bruna Dantas Lobato (author)
Edition
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition
Physical Description
178 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780802163776
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Translator Dantas Lobato debuts with a delicate story of a student's first year at college and the pain of separation between her and her mother. After the unnamed narrator arrives at her Vermont dorm room, she calls her mother in Brazil every day, regaling her with updates about the New England weather, especially the first snow. The gulf between them widens as the narrator acclimates to college, while her mother remains consumed by chronic migraines and depression. By the spring semester, the mother's health rebounds while the daughter's zest for her new environment wanes ("Snow had started to leave a tinge of lifelessness on everything, and I stopped going outside"). The novel's arc is shaped by a sudden inversion in the mother-daughter dynamic, as the narrator finds herself in need of comfort rather than obliging her mother's needs. Throughout, Dantas Lobato crafts atmospheric details of the pastoral setting and of the ersatz intimacy of video calls ("My mother stayed in the shade for a moment longer, her cheeks glowing with the blue light of her computer screen"). This shines. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Every night, a college student and her mother reconnect over Skype. "I'd never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw," Dantas Lobato writes near the beginning of her debut novel. "I would need as much time for telling as I would need for living." Dantas Lobato's narrator, a young girl from Brazil, has just started her first year of college in Vermont. Almost every night, she and her mother talk over Skype about their lives, their thoughts, and the mundanities of their days. This is a slim work with a narrow focus that belies the depth of its own emotion, the profundity of Dantas Lobato's observations. It is part campus novel, part coming-of-age novel, and, more than anything, it is a novel about the relationship between a mother and daughter. The mother, whose health is less than ideal, has stayed home in Brazil while the daughter ventures out into the wider world--but not without regret and guilt for the mother she's left behind. "I would give anything to live there with you," her mother tells her. "Where it snows milk, and even the people are milky, and there's milk on tap in the dining hall, and squirrels…greet you in the morning." There's a quiet lyricism to Dantas Lobato's prose, an elegance both to her sentences and to the shape of the book as a whole. It's a work you could read in an afternoon or linger over for an entire winter, finding something new to savor on each page. In 2023, Dantas Lobato won the National Book Award for her translation of Stênio Gardel'sThe Words That Remain. In her first novel, she shows that her talent as a writer is at least as tremendous as her talent as a translator. A quiet, meticulously constructed novel about a mother and a daughter. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.