How would a center schooler navigate an unspeakable tragedy? That’s the topic Liz Garton Scanlon superbly explores in Lolo’s Light, her second center grade novel.
Twelve-year-old Millie is thrilled when she will get her first babysitting job. Her older sister isn’t out there, so Millie will get to look at their neighbors’ 4-month-old child, Lolo. The Acostas make the job straightforward, placing Lolo to mattress earlier than they depart so Millie simply must examine on her. As Millie revels in her new duty, she feels “something shift, like that exact moment [is] the end of her being a kid and the beginning of her being real, full-grown Millie.” The night time goes swimmingly and the Acostas return residence to seek out that each one is effectively. But the subsequent morning, the world turns the wrong way up, as a result of in a single day, Lolo dies of SIDS.
Garton Scanlon clearly establishes that nobody is guilty for this tragedy whereas additionally conveying Millie’s ongoing emotions of shock and anguish. As Millie grieves, she can be haunted—and comforted—by a lightweight that appears to emanate from Lolo’s bed room window at any time when Millie walks previous the Acostas’ home, which Millie believes is Lolo’s presence.
Author Liz Garton Scanlon discusses how she captured the arduous work of therapeutic in ‘Lolo’s Light.’
Millie receives help from quite a few caring adults, together with her mother and father, her instructor, her faculty librarian and a therapist, in addition to the Acostas. Garton Scanlon makes excellent use of Millie’s seventh grade science undertaking, hatching hen eggs, as a focus for Millie’s sorrow, despair and rising anxiousness. As Millie’s instructor tells her, “You are trying to make sense of something very big and ancient and scary. You’re trying to process how unbelievably fragile life can be.”
Despite its heavy subject, Lolo’s Light is finally a hopeful e-book about therapeutic that captures how a lot arduous work, together with time, the method can require. Garton Scanlon infuses the story with excellent moments of humor, too, resembling the various puns that come up through the science undertaking scenes. (Millie’s science undertaking group’s identify, “the Egg-ceptionals,” is just the start.)
In writing Lolo’s Light, Garton Scanlon undertook a monumental problem. The result’s a compelling novel that glows with understanding and empathy.
Read our Q&A with ‘Lolo’s Light’ creator Liz Garton Scanlon.
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