The Effects of Light

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Miranda Beverly-Whittemore's debut novel, The Effects of Light, is the story of Myla and Prudence (Pru) Wolfe, whose father David must raise them after they lose their mother in a tragic car accident. Helping David rear his daughters are a clan of academics, artists, and intellectuals, including photographer Ruth Handel, whose nude portraits of the girls become the centerpiece around which their lives unravel. Part mystery, part metaphor, part love story, and part philosophical treatise, The Effects of Light is an intriguing, yet perhaps overly ambitious first effort for this young author.

When we first meet Myla, she is Kate Scott, an East Coast academic who has seemingly wiped out all traces of her childhood. After a mysterious letter summons her home to Portland, Oregon, pieces of the tragedy that killed her sister and forced Myla to start her life anew start to surface, and the quest for truth begins. ("She was driving into this place, she was pushing into it, she would bore into it, find what she'd buried, and carry it into day.") Details from the past are told through the voice of Prudence, whose idyllic childhood grows more tumultuous as the photographs gain public attention and their innocence is called into question. Adding drama to the story is Myla's budding romance with colleague Samuel Blake, whose true intentions are called into question on more than one occasion.

Beverly-Whittemore has an obvious gift for describing raw human emotions, and at its best, The Effects of Light is a lyrical exploration of love, joy, forgiveness, and reconcilliation. However, when she launches into lengthy philosophical discussions about art history and the human condition, the novel steers off course. Once she tightens up her game a bit, we can look forward to many more captivating reads from this talented young writer. --Gisele Toueg


From Publishers Weekly
Beverly-Whittemore investigates the relationship between art and life in an engaging but uneven debut that reveals both her promise and her youth (she was born in 1976). As children, Myla Wolfe and her now deceased sister, Pru, posed for a series of provocative photographs. Because of an unnamed (but aggressively insinuated) tragedy, Myla has spent her adult life as a history professor named Kate Scott (though an unconvincing one: "So much passion over something so potentially boring: medieval research!... She felt lost in ideas"). A mysterious letter and a colleague's lecture draw her back to her hometown, where she tries to put together the puzzle of her dead father's academic work, reconnect with those she left behind, rediscover herself as Myla and forge a new love with the aforementioned colleague. Her quest is juxtaposed with the parallel narrative of the tragedy's buildup, as told by her dead sister. Beverly-Whittemore gets points for her ambitious plot, but a naïve intellectual enthusiasm overwhelms the novel, and in trying to incorporate too many heavy themes, she obscures the novel's focus: is this a mystery? an allegory? a graduate student essay? At one point, Myla recalls how her father congratulated her for refusing to learn to read yet, thus demonstrating that "she wasn't ready... to lose the big picture." Beverly-Whittemore doesn't seem ready to lose it, either—but next time, perhaps she'll exert more control over her far-reaching visions. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Thirteen years after she fled the West Coast, Kate Scott is returning to hesitantly pry open painful memories of her sister and her father. A mysterious package from an unknown benefactor shows Kate that someone else knows her turbulent secret history as a child-model for a controversial photographer. Her lover, Samuel, follows Kate and pledges to help her unearth the clues her father has left behind, but when Kate discovers Samuel's notebook with surreptitious jottings about herself and her family's notorious past, she rejects him. Readers will be drawn into the mystery surrounding Kate's sister, her father, and Ruth, the photographer, even wondering who Kate truly is. Told in alternating voices between Kate and her sister, this first novel is drawing prepublication parallels with The Lovely Bones (for the narrative voices of its teen characters), Girl with a Pearl Earring (for its art-world frame) and Possession (for its plot of academics searching ancient documents for contemporary truths. Passionate writing, skillful plotting, and intriguing characters make this a necessary purchase. An excellent selection for a book discussion group. Kaite Mediatore
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
DESCRIPTION: This richly evocative, poignant novel about two sisters, whose lives are forever altered by a series of photos, marks the debut of a remarkable talent. Bound by the loss of their mother and encouraged to "follow their bliss" by their brilliant professor father, young Myla and Pru Wolfe blaze a path through childhood, hungry for all life has to offer. Their precocity and ethereal beauty soon make them the favorite subjects of photographer and family friend Ruth Handel, whose celebrated images of children involve nudity. Suddenly the girls are at the center of a firestorm of controversy, with shattering results. Now, 13 years later, Myla Wolfe is living back east and finally edging toward romance, when she begins receiving mysterious communications that force her to confront her past and reclaim her future.


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A thought-provoking debut about a young woman attempting to untangle a tortured and confused past. After living under a false name and identity for 20 years, East Coast academic Myla Wolfe returns to her childhood home in the Pacific Northwest to face her demons: the memories surrounding a controversial exhibition of photographs featuring herself and her late sister in various stages of undress and/or nude, taken when they were children. The result was a barrage of humiliating attention and the death of the sister, although not until the very end is the connection between the photos and the death made clear. Were the pictures art? Pornography? Clearly, the photographer believed they were art, as did the girls' father, an art history professor profoundly committed to freedom of expression and the notion of relativism-the idea that there are multiple and equally valid interpretations to virtually everything, especially works of art. Still, Myla believes her father, now long dead, betrayed them by allowing the photographs to be taken, unwittingly using his daughters as pawns to reflect his cultural politics. In addition to grappling with a boyfriend, another academic who has his own agenda in connection with the photographs, Myla begins sorting through her father's papers in an effort to understand him. And in the end, she buys into his thesis that things are always more complicated than they seem, accepting the idea, offered by a family friend, that her father allowed the pictures to be shot for personal, not cultural, reasons having to do with his late wife. This revelation, like many others, comes out of thin air. Entertaining but schematic, with characters' motivations often sounexpected as to be nearly implausible. Agent: Anne Hawkins/John Hawkins & Associates


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