By the Light of the Soul: A Novel

In a small New England town, nine-year-old Maria Edgham sits in a church vestry during a prayer meeting, watching the gathered mourners with the fierce attention only a child can muster. Her mother is dying. Her father has begun visiting Miss Slome, the schoolteacher. And somewhere in the space between the hymns and the hushed adult grief, Maria is learning that the world can change without asking permission. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, a master of American local color fiction, renders childhood with unsettling clarity: the way small hands grip a pew, the way a grieving mother catches a stray thought and follows it to madness, the way a young girl's admiration for a man can curdle into something more complicated when her own world begins to crumble. This is not a sentimental portrait of innocence. It is an excavation of how children perceive adult pain, and how those perceptions shape the selves they become. At once tender and unflinching, By the Light of the Soul captures the particular loneliness of standing at the threshold between childhood and the adult world, watching the people you love most become strangers.