First Light

 First Light

By Rebecca Stead

I first encountered Rebecca Stead when our entire school read one of her books, Goodbye Stranger, a few years ago. The whole-school read idea ended up being misguided for a number of reasons, but the book was quite good, and we followed it up with an author visit. Since then I've sought out anything and everything she's written. 

Like many of Stead's books, this story combines some science-fiction elements with modern-day realism. In this case, the realism part comes in the form of Peter, a 14-year-old New York City kid whose dad, a glaciologist, brings the family on a research trip to Greenland. The sci-fi part comes in the form of Thea, the youngest direct descendant of Grace, who led a group from England to Greenland to escape persecution from witchcraft. In Greenland, the group found refuge inside a glacier. Relying on scientific ingenuity -- they found a way to preserve ice so that it could retain its ice-like properties whilst remaining impervious to temperature -- they built a thriving community below the ice, safe from their pursuers.

The conflict in the story revolves around Thea's attempt to revive her late mother's push to explore the outside world. She finds the long forgotten -- and sealed -- tunnel the original settlers used to travel into the glacier. Her Grandmother, the matriarch of the community, Gracehope, however, is set against this idea. When Thea travels to the surface anyway, an accident nearly kills her cousin and brings her into contact with Peter, who, it turns out, has a lot more in common with Thea than he initially knows. And I'll leave it at that in case someone out there is reading this before picking up the book.

Stead is a great storyteller, there's no doubt about that. So I really enjoyed this book, and, in fact, had a hard time putting it down. But it's not quite up there with some of her others, particularly When You Reach Me. The sci-fi part of the book didn't really work as well. It was kind of strange that she tried to link this strange community with real-world events without exploring those events in much detail. And her explanations for the technologies developed to survive in Gracehope serve to undermine the world she's created. The lanterns they have, for instance, run on "oxygen". Right. Better not to have explained it at all. And so it is the characters that bring this book alive, and keep you coming back to it. Though we met only briefly, I will miss them.