Lori Lansens is one of my favourite Canadian writers; I’ve read and loved
all of her books so I was anxious to read This
Little Light, her latest novel. It
is an intense, compelling read.
Events are set in Calabasas, California, over a period of 48 hours in
November of 2024. Sixteen-year-old Rory
Miller and her best friend, Fee (Feliza) Lopez, are hunted fugitives hiding in
a shed. They are accused of bombing their
Christian high school during an American Virtue Ball after they took virginity
oaths. As they hide, Rory writes for her
blog, This Little Light, explaining
what is happening in the present and what lead to their being outlaws: “In order to remain calm-ish, I’m going to
write our side of the story. I’m afraid
we’ll be tracked to the shed if I post entries in real time, so I won’t submit
until I know we’re safe.”
Rory’s world is a dystopian near-future which was obviously inspired by
current events. Her world is that of
double- and triple-gated communities outside of which there are “dozens of tent
cities and homeless encampments” inhabited by illegal immigrants. Because of drought, finding safe drinking water
is difficult: “now irrigation water’s
reclaimed so not potable, and you can only drink bottled or tap, but only if
the tap has a filtration system, which many poor people still don’t have.” And “it’s always fire season now.”
Christian fundamentalists have gained political power so abortion has
been re-criminalized: “we girls hung on
all the celebrity accusations and #MeToo confessions just like everyone else. Then came all the abortion stuff. Fetal heartbeat restrictions. Counseling restrictions. Ultrasound requirements. Near bans and outright prohibitions.” Teenaged girls are pressured to make chastity
oaths, but there does exist a Pink
Market “helping minors access birth control, and morning-after pills, and getting
them to underground clinics.”
Rory and Fee are branded “Villains in Versace” but Rory is not a
typical privileged girl. Though she has
typical adolescent concerns (“fear of missing out” and “fear of losing my best
friends” to a new girl and getting “a lot of likes” on social media), she cares
about others. During a fire evacuation,
she worries about “Mrs. Shea at the end of our street because she’s deaf and
takes too many pills.” She knows that “not
everybody starts life with the same degree of privilege” and wonders “Wouldn’t
it be better for everyone to, like, find a way to get everybody in the game?” Her mother’s description of Rory is the most
accurate: someone believing “in truth,
and honesty, humility and humanity. . . . relentless in her questioning of
herself, and of our world.”
More than once, Rory is described as “Relentless. Too true. I never shut up. I never give up. I ask too many questions. I’m a contrarian.” It is her intelligent and independent thinking
that stands out. She calls out a friend
who refuses to give money to a beggar by saying, “’That’s straight-up
unchristian, Jinny.’” She makes
observations like “when you mix wealth and privilege and religion, and
isolation from the real world, I mean, when people actually believe they
deserve their shit, they’re gonna tend to skew dickish.” She asks, “Shouldn’t actual evidence decide
guilt or innocence, not freaking polls?”
She expresses disgust with immigration policy when one woman is
deported, “being sent to a place she hasn’t seen in twenty-five years, where
she has no family or friends. Jesus
fucking Christ.” She is not afraid of
self-examination either: “all the things
I’ve taken for granted. The sense of
entitlement . . . My house. My ensuite
bathroom. My filtered water. Agua.
Not just clean water to drink and
cook with, but clean water to wash myself with.”
Rory has an authentic teenage voice.
She tends to end words with y
like “corpse-y” and “spectrum-y” and “pose-y” and “desert-y”. She says “prolly” for probably and overuses “whatever”.
In her sentences, she leaves out words:
a father is “hardly home because work”; Calabasas “is famous because
Kardashians”; teenage girls eat little “of the food because thin”; and “My
parents, because Canadian, but also because statistics, hated guns, and brought
me up to fear and loathe them too.”
The novel certainly maintains the reader’s interest throughout. There is suspense because of the danger which
the girls face. Rory and Fee are being
chased by the police but also by fundamentalist Christians known as Crusaders
and by bounty hunters seeking the million dollar reward for finding them. Dogs, drones and helicopters are being used. Hate against them is being inflamed on
television and online. Of course, the
reader also wants to know what happened to bring the girls into this
situation. Rory flashes back to earlier
events and gradually reveals the sequence of events that lead to their being
fugitives.
The message of the book is that people must question and work to find
the truth. Rory calls out someone who
uses graphic images “to emotionally manipulate . . . and confuse” in an argument
against a woman’s right to make decisions about her body. Rory realizes that her and Fee’s hope lies in
“journalists, and regular people, . . . starting to question.” She even wants to have children and teach
them about resistance: “I wanna raise
the kind of people who speak up, and ask questions, and call themselves out as
well as others, and dig deeper.”
This novel touches on so many subjects:
women’s rights, economic disparity, immigration, religion, sexuality,
climate change, and parenting. Of
course, I could not but think of The
Handmaid’s Tale. Like Atwood’s book,
This Little Light offers so much to
ponder. Though the novel is set in 2024,
the world described is much more present than future.
Note: In return for an honest
review, I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.
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