GIRL OF LIGHT

A girl tries to do what’s right in a world thrown into darkness in Gomel’s fantasy novel.

In Svetlana Chernov’s world, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow the Light. The Light, in turn, protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading army of wolf-headed men on their borders, and the infectious, ever-evolving, zombie-like Enemy that plagues them at home. In the industrial town of Loadstone Rock, teenage Svetlana stays up late studying the Enemy: their physical modifications, feeding habits, and other dangers. Her best friend, Tattie, isn’t quite as academic. When Tattie attempts a dowsing ritual with a mirror meant to reveal her future, she’s drawn mysteriously into its depths; Svetlana realizes her friend is missing and sets out to find her—a quest that causes her to cross the path of Andrei, a confused soldier who’s wandered away from the war, and Vadim, an Inspector tasked with rooting out Enemy infestations. Svetlana’s search for Tattie becomes a disturbing journey into a society—and a belief system—on the brink of collapse. Gomel’s prose is inflected with Slavic-tinged folklore and Soviet-era imagery, effectively creating a world that feels both familiar and alien at the same time: “The dark windows of granite-clad mansions frowned at the wide boulevard lined with bare black trees….Svetlana had heard horror stories of the cocoons hanging in the stuffy dark and hatching shape-shifting oborotni and krovososy, the crawling, worm-like vampires.” The mythology and imagery throughout the novel are rich and weird—one that brings mind the Eastern Front of World War II, but with monsters and lightsabers. Even more impressive is the psychologically rich portrayal of characters pushed to the brink by war. This novel, with its remarkable and timely echoes of the current conflict in Ukraine, will make its way into readers’ minds and refuse to leave.

A cerebral, nightmarish, but compulsively readable tale.