Blue Light Hours

In her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, Bruna Dantas Lobato, a translator whose short stories have been widely published in notable publications, tells the story of a young, relatively poor Brazilian woman who has earned a scholarship to study at a New England college known for its writing program. Her deep desire to become a writer helps her face the challenges of a new country, new language, new friends, and a vigorous educational experience.

Most difficult of all the things she must adapt to is her separation from her mother with whom she shares a deep connection. The 4000 miles of distance that divide them is relieved almost daily by Skype visits which seem mundane but are full of longing. Thus begins a story of love, a soul saving relationship, the immigrant experience, and the journey of an emerging adult who is maturing and developing her identity and in a foreign culture.

Told in simple but moving language, the book draws one into what must be a largely autobiographical novel, suggested by the fact that the author and her protagonist are both Brazilian and students at the same college. That makes for a touching and realistic day to day, season to season account of college life, loneliness, self-doubt, and ultimately personal growth. It also gifts the reader with a genuinely loving mother-daughter relationship, which is shared by the glow of a computer screen and the blue light next to it.

The relationship between mother and daughter is immediately clear in the first few pages of this slim novel. “There were too many things to name,” the main character says, as she thinks about how to describe her new home and surroundings to her mom. “Everything needed a shape, a texture, a color,” the budding writer notes. “I understood then that I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw, that I would need as much time for telling as I would need for living.” That beautifully crafted thought is packed with meaning as we come to know the narrator and her closest, faraway relative. “Still,” she writes, “I tried. I described to her what it felt like to walk through thick fog, to wear wool around my neck, to eat honey barbeque sauce on ribs.”  

“’Do you promise me?’ her mother asks. ‘Do you promise you’ll come back in one piece?’” There’s a lot of love packed into those few words, and we immediately get the character of both mother and daughter and their deep love for each other.

It’s that deeply emotional, clear writing that conveys so much in Lobato’s writing. She says so much with so few words we don’t have to imagine what is going on, we feel it and see it and hear it. That is the gift of good writing.

As the story develops and the year progresses, the challenges the narrator faces change. There is the need for self-discipline required to keep up with academic work and a sane social life, the wish to assure her mother she is safe, an alarming health episode her mother experiences without sounding alarmist, and the time it takes to keep painting word pictures for her mother, all while she contemplates her next steps when the year ends. 

Still, she and her anchor mother “sent each other virtual hugs, blew each other kisses, smeared our computer screens reaching for each other. In the movie of my life in America, the one my mother like to watch, a young woman sits alone in her bedroom and calls her mother each night on a computer. ‘I’m coming for you, Mom,’ she says over the machine. Here’s something to keep you busy in the meantime. Here’s something to remember me by.”

Such ruminations populate the book and include the reader in the intimate space between two women who care so deeply for each other that it warms us as it does them. In the end the mother visits the daughter briefly after a five-year separation. The night before mother and daughter must separate yet again, they sit together at the kitchen table, refusing to sleep in their last hours together, “anchored by the weight of each other’s hands. . . . For the rest of the night, the glowing screen sat between them. It bathed them in a miraculous blue light.” We see the light, too.