Raymond Strom’s debut novel Northern Lights is the kind of self-assured debut novel we get about once or twice a year. Loaded with skill that is easily seen by anyone who reads it and with the one of the year’s most incredible and memorable leading characters at its center, it is an easy book to like and get behind despite some of its glaring short comings, which I will get too. While reading it and thinking about the things I did not like about this book (which there were very few instances of), I kept reminding myself that it is supposed to take place in the late 90’s, a fact that helps this book in the short term but overall hurts it as well. Thankfully, most of the time those feelings of apprehension are quelled every time we are in the presence of Shane Stephenson, the fraught, sensitive youth at the novel’s center. As the book begins, he is reeling after the death of his father. His grief, and a rather cold goodbye from his uncle, bring him to the town of Holm, Minnesota in search of his mother who abandoned him and his father when Shane was very young. Androgynous, asexual and non-binary long before that term was popular, Shane is not an easy fit for the failing small town, but finds a job at a local breakfast place and a familial bond with the town’s outcast, the main one of which, Jenny, provides him with the love he is seeking after the death of his father. As I said, the time period helps explain some of the clunky interactions, especially with the book’s defacto villain Sven Svenson, as one not and unoriginal as his name. But when I thought of its time period, it made me realize how informed the book is by the here and now and it took me out of the story. It’s last hundred pages, which include Shane’s nightmarish and sad reunion with his mother and the predictable but gut-wrenching finale, make this a rather memorable debut novel.
Rating: 4/5
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