Easter Sunday, 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready for her life to finally begin. Her sprawling, bohemian family and their friends gather in the idyllic English countryside for lunch, arranging themselves around well-worn roles. They trade political views and artistic arguments as they impatiently await the arrival and first sight of Frances, the new beau of Ivy's beloved older brother, Joseph. In this auspicious atmosphere of springtime, Ivy's world feels on the cusp of something grand-but neither she nor those closest to her predicts how a single, enchanted evening and an unexpected tragedy will alter the rest of their lives. A journey through time, Days of Light chronicles six pivotal days across six decades to tell the story of Ivy's pursuit of answers.
Hunter writes with powerful specificity about sensation—the experience, bodily, of moving though the world ...
As so many literary novelists working today do, Hunter leans heavily on lyrical description and imagery. Dialogue is scant in Days of Light, and the plot is simple. The author clearly cares more about how the writing makes the reader feel, and the luminous images it evokes, than about weaving a story that will reveal Ivy’s character.
The strategy falls flat. By only choosing the most important days, Hunter is trying to have it both ways: to immerse us in the inner world of a single character but keep the action spicy too. The result is that neither really comes off ... Many readers will enjoy the images of genuine lyrical beauty in Days of Light...but the novel concludes in the same state of suspension that Ivy was experiencing on page 1. It was odd: I spent six decades with a character but finished the book feeling that I didn’t know her at all.
The early parts of the novel are a vividly immersive delight ... As the years pass, though, the book loses some of its early momentum. Novels like David Nicholls’s One Day may make it look easy, but a satisfying narrative that contains itself to only a handful of days is extremely hard to pull off.
