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Losing a child is every parent's worst nightmare --- the rending of a pure love; the loss of a life that one is charged with protecting. A life full of promise and opportunity lies fallow and unfulfilled. But when that loss comes as a result of a suicide, those feelings are wrapped up in an unbearable sense of failure, and life for the surviving becomes an endless refrain of "Why?"
In LIGHT OF DAY, Jamie M. Saul tells the story of Dr. Jack Owens, an intelligent, successful professor of Film Studies at a small Indiana college. The term is ending, and Jack is trying to wrap up the grading of final projects so that he can escape on a long-planned summer vacation with his son Danny. As a single father, Jack struggles with the work-family balance known only too well to single parents everywhere, and feels guilty that he's spent so little time in the last week with his son, who seems like a smart, well-adjusted teen, displaying a bit of moodiness common to all fifteen-year-olds but otherwise smart and sharp for his age. A few moments later, however, Jack's idyllic spring afternoon at the office is shattered as a police detective arrives with the heartbreaking news: Danny has killed himself.
The chapters that follow are heartbreakingly realistic and completely riveting. As Jack spirals through layers of grief and despair, author Jamie Saul deftly slides between his painful day-to-day coping and flashbacks of earlier times spent with Danny and Danny's mother, Anne, who left Jack and Danny when Danny was four. With the help of an unexpected friend, Jack carefully begins to unravel the spool of the life he'd built for himself and his son, and he begins to understand the different kinds of losses and the impact they can have on our lives.
Treating all of his characters with great respect, Saul's prose is both muscular and polished, and his sense of timing is impeccable. While the unblinking focus on Jack's lonely grief feels claustrophobic at times, it's unerringly realistic, and what begins to seem like a simple story of a man becoming unhinged by a tragedy soon takes unexpected twists and turns as Jack begins to piece together some answers to the questions that made up the final weeks of Danny's life.
Saul, a journalist and television writer by trade, shows sensitivity and a rare understanding of the human psyche in his debut novel. As the story begins to really gather steam in the final chapters, Saul shows remarkable restraint and grace in revealing his ending. LIGHT OF DAY is a moving, elegant novel that lingers with the reader long after the last page is turned.
--- Reviewed by Lourdes Orive
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