Gave up on reading this. Not well written, in my opinion. Characters were caricatures without depth. Unrealistic situations. Why bother reading? ( )

I've knocked off a lot of good books over the last couple of weeks including David Cohen's Disappearing off the face of the earth, Per Petterson's It's Fine By Me and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project. Despite this competition, I expected How The Light Gets In to be the star and I have not been disappointed.

Like Gail Jones' Black Mirror, it's a first novel by an Australian. The similarities stop there. How the Light Gets In is a perfect novel. Utterly gripping, with a creepy flawed main character who nonetheless engages our sympathies from the start and never loses them, it must be right up there with best first novels ever. It'd make a great movie.

Highly recommended.

For the author's comments on her disconcertingly similar life, go here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/how-the-light-gets-in-by-... ( )

I've knocked off a lot of good books over the last couple of weeks including David Cohen's Disappearing off the face of the earth, Per Petterson's It's Fine By Me and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project. Despite this competition, I expected How The Light Gets In to be the star and I have not been disappointed.

Like Gail Jones' Black Mirror, it's a first novel by an Australian. The similarities stop there. How the Light Gets In is a perfect novel. Utterly gripping, with a creepy flawed main character who nonetheless engages our sympathies from the start and never loses them, it must be right up there with best first novels ever. It'd make a great movie.

Highly recommended.

For the author's comments on her disconcertingly similar life, go here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/how-the-light-gets-in-by-... ( )

I've knocked off a lot of good books over the last couple of weeks including David Cohen's Disappearing off the face of the earth, Per Petterson's It's Fine By Me and Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project. Despite this competition, I expected How The Light Gets In to be the star and I have not been disappointed.

Like Gail Jones' Black Mirror, it's a first novel by an Australian. The similarities stop there. How the Light Gets In is a perfect novel. Utterly gripping, with a creepy flawed main character who nonetheless engages our sympathies from the start and never loses them, it must be right up there with best first novels ever. It'd make a great movie.

Highly recommended.

For the author's comments on her disconcertingly similar life, go here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/how-the-light-gets-in-by-... ( )

“The gap between who we think we are, what we’d like to say, how we’d like to behave, and then how we in fact behave, who we in fact are. This gap, this dissonance is fascinating. I want to nail this in a book. I want to create a character that shows this problem in interesting and dramatic ways. I think we all suffer from this quotidian dissonance, we all—to varying degrees—have experienced this gap between our thoughts, desires, and our actions, deeds.” —M.J. Hyland

(3.5) This is the first of Hyland's three novels (to date) and the third one I've read. It focuses on 16-year-old, Australian exchange student, "Lou"(Louise) Connor, who believes that she can somehow transform herself and her life by coming to America. Louise is the youngest child in an amoral family of grifters: her parents are frequently unemployed; her sisters are superficial, loose, and crass; their low-life boyfriends are barely this side of criminal, and all of them tumble together in a squalid council flat in Sydney. Lou is intelligent, driven, sharply observant, reliably hypercritical, frequently untruthful, morbid, and deeply uncomfortable in her own skin. Hyland's depiction of her protagonist’s profound shame and intense anxiety is second to none. There are hints of OCD, as well. All of this makes How the Light Gets In a perceptive but uncomfortable read. Surprisingly, however, there are uproariously funny moments—the most notable being Lou’s first encounter with Lishny, a Russian exchange student. (Sadly, humour is entirely lacking in Hyland’s subsequent two novels.)

Lou's host family, the Hardings, are upper middle-class, and initially the girl revels in the the polished floors, the clean bed linens, and the tastefully appointed rooms of their house in the Chicago suburbs. On first arriving, Lou lies—easily but not exactly shamelessly—about her family back in Australia. (Yes, she used to have a pet kangaroo named Skippy; no, they can't phone her parents: they're on vacation in Spain.) Lou's intense self-consciousness and anxiety soon have her reaching for the bottle. Alcohol softens life’s sharp edges, pacifies her harsh internal critic, and seems to bestow confidence on her. It also causes trouble. Ultimately, the Harding parents (ironically and naively) find her influence on their own (less-than-angelic) teenage children so "corrupting" that they call in representatives of "The Organisation", the group responsible for exchange students, to have her removed from their home. The girl is taken to a house for wayward exchange students (yes, really) in downtown Chicago. There, Lou does undergo a transformation of sorts, but Hyland intimates that true transformation of the self is very hard to achieve. Basically: wherever you go, there you are. Maybe, too, it’s not wise to discard all of one’s defence mechanisms.

Lou's infractions are far less serious in nature than those of the young men in Hyland’s later novels. Nevertheless, I found her less sympathetic than those male protagonists. Lou Connor is certainly interesting, but her self-centredness and persistent unease might wear on some readers. Also, the resolution Hyland provides for her main character is abrupt and it feels rather contrived. Even so, How the Light Gets In is a perceptive and mostly compelling portrait of a young girl. ( )