tl;dr heartbreakingly beautiful story of grief and falling in love again
Premise
Nine months after the death of her father, Marigold is forced to pick up and move from sunny Los Angeles all the way across the country to rural upstate New York. According to her mom, living with her aunt in a big old house in the woods is the fresh start Marigold and her little sister need. But Mary aches for the things she’s leaving behind—her best friend, her older sister, her now-long-distance boyfriend, and the senior year that felt like her only chance at making things feel normal again.
On top of everything, Mary has a troubling secret: she’s starting to forget her dad. The void he’s left in her memory is quickly getting filled with bonfires, house parties, and hours in the darkroom with Jesse, a fellow photographer and kindred spirit whom she can’t stop thinking about. As the beauty of Mary’s new world begins to sink in and her connection with Jesse grows stronger, she feels caught between her old life and her new one. Mary might just be losing her grip on the pieces of her life that she’s tried so hard to hold together.
When the two finally come crashing together, Mary will have to decide what she really wants and come to terms with the ways that the loss of her dad has changed who she is. Even if she can’t hold on to her past forever, maybe she can choose what to keep.
Rating
3.25/5 stars
Review
catch the light follows mary after she moves from california to upstate new york following her father's death. she has to balance who/what she has back in california (her best friend & boyfriend and the memory of her father) and her new life in new york (as well as a guy she can't get out of her head...).
this book did a good job with its depiction of grief, especially in the way it showed how people cope with grief differently. mary really struggles with the downward spiral that happened after she lost her father: not only learning how to remember him/move forward but also dealing with everything else in her life, from friends to relationships to college plans. mary begins to think that she's forgetting her father, and she needs to reconcile that and realize that even though there are some little parts of her past that she's lost, there's also a huge part of her father that still remains with her. mary's struggle with grief is not linear, it's messy, and it's told very authentically.
sibling/family relationships are also a big theme in this book, with mary, her sisters, and her mother. they all cope in different ways, and in the book they really needed to get to know each other again. it all came down to communication and some understanding. their relationship, again, was imperfect but realistic.
photography was one of mary's biggest interests, and i think that became a good symbol of mary's process with grief and reconciling her father's memory.
time to discuss romance lol. i think this is where my rating becomes not a 5-star rating. there's mary, bennett (the guy from cali who mary was with before), and jesse (the new guy). bennett is pretty cool. jesse is amazing. it's giving golden retriever energy and this man is just so considerate and respectful and exudes so much joy. i love him. he's so cute. him and mary are very adorable.
now you see.. when i opened the book the first thing i said was "i hope there's no emotional cheating". well.. there was what i would classify as emotional (and physical) cheating. there is a degree of nuance to the situation because mary and bennett never really defined their relationship and were kind of on the rocks, but they were still romantically involved. mary very clearly wanted to break it off with bennett, she just needed to do so before doing anything with jesse. for mary, bennett served as a connection to her past and thus, to her father. and i can see how it was hard for her to let him go. but man, both him and jesse deserve better than to be lied to.
i think it's important to note that although (many of) the choices mary makes in the book weren't the best, her judgment was very much clouded by what she was going through. now, that definitely doesn't excuse what she did, but she was basically in this avalanche of lies and trying to appear like everything was a-ok. yes, it did backfire in the end. yes, i really wish she had done things differently. but yes, she also was not herself.
Other Info
Standalone
14+
CW: death of loved one (in the past), grief, depression, underage drinking
Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0593350235?tag=randohouseinc7986-20
Would I Recommend?
Generally, yes
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