Review: Truly excellent
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 10, 2012
I've just finished the Gives Light quartet by Rose Christo. And I'll say right off that I found the books very moving. The books, in order, are 1) Gives Light 2) Looks Over 3) St. Clair 4) Why the Star Stands Still .Here we have a study in contrasts, between two very different boys. While Skylar has a naturally outgoing and optimistic personality, the horrific attack he suffered at the age of five at the hands of his mother's murderer has left him with a scarred throat and taken away his voice, which does distance him from society to a certain extent. Rafael, the son of the murderer, is gruff and taciturn and forever an outsider on the reservation because most people only see his hated father when they look at him.The first books tells what happens when these two meet and forge a relationship; how they change one another and help each other move past the figurative scars that are chaining them both to their pasts. And what I took away from the series as a whole is that yes---really terrible things do happen in life. But it's possible to survive disaster, to do your best to become something more and make a positive difference in the world. And that's a message worth sharing.I've noted before that if I really care for the characters in a story, and find the situations interesting, I'm willing to overlook any number of shortcomings a novel may have. And make no mistake, I found portions of this story incredibly moving. But in this case, there weren't any major shortcomings to overlook.Now, I'm not saying the books are perfect. I think they are well written, but occasionally I would come across a stray word that seemed like an odd choice to use. And the manuscripts could have been tightened up a bit---there's some repetition from one book to the next. Perhaps a few of the plot points seemed a bit "iffy" to me; occasionally I would think that situations wouldn't logically have worked out the way they did, and there were a couple of coincidences that, while advancing the plot, seemed extremely unlikely to me. However, due to the emotional impact the story had on me overall I can't say I had too much of a problem with these smaller issues.The author doesn't make these novels seem like lessons, meant to instruct the reader about Native American culture---far from it. But she works in a fair amount of information throughout the stories, regarding Native American history and traditions, and what life is like on the smaller reservations today. I can honestly say that I probably learned more about indigenous peoples in the past two weeks, from reading these books, than I had in my entire life previously. The author obviously feels very strongly about certain modern-day issues and problems that Native Americans face even today, and when reading these stories the audience will share these emotions.This series of books shows precisely how drastically publishing has changed in the past few years, since the advent of e-readers. They are self-published---which I hasten to add is not at all the same thing as the vanity presses used in the past. Since getting my Kindle, I've read quite a few self-published works. And yes----some of them are dreadful. But others are quite as good as---or even better---than the material that is coming from the big six publishing houses. (I think the trick to producing a work of professional quality---apart from innate talent, of course---is to have a good editor. And there's no reason a self-published title cannot be every bit as good as what hits the store shelves every month.) I think these stories could have used just a bit more polish, but I'm not complaining. I don't know that the big six would have touched them, perhaps thinking that their appeal wouldn't be wide enough, and that's a shame.By all means, try the first and see what you think; if you like it, move on to the others.