We Are the Light

My full review is posted at https://literaryquicksand.com/2022/10/review-we-are-the-light-by-matthew-quick/

This book made me remember being in college in my English classes, talking about unreliable narrators. Lucas Goodgame really came off as an unreliable narrator, and he has a really good excuse: trauma.

The community of Majestic has experienced a tragedy, and the whole town is affected – especially the people with loved ones who perished in the tragedy.

In short, there's been a shooting in a movie theater, and Lucas's wife was shot and killed. The whole book is told in letters after the tragedy that Lucas writes to his therapist, who doesn't answer any of the letters. So, it's a narrative from a man in a deep depression who's seeing his wife appearing to him as an angel.

The best part of this book is Lucas's relationship with Eli. They're two people who clearly need camaraderie and somewhere to put their weird grief energy (which really is a real grief thing).

The grief and mental health stuff in this book was really well done, which I definitely expected from the author of The Silver Linings Playbook. Quick has a way of getting so deeply into the minds of his characters, and somehow conveying the complexity of their emotion to the reader.