Book Thoughts: The Light of the Fireflies by Paul Pen

The Light of the Fireflies by Paul Pen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an easy book to read and a hard book to process. It has solid writing and a fast pace, that pushes you as reader to unravel the story behind the characters, who generally have no names, and are referred to by their relation to the primary character, the "boy;" so we have father, mother, sister, brother, and grandmother.

The family is living underground, and have lived underground for the boy's entire life, who is 11 at the beginning of the book. His mother, father, brother, and grandmother are all disfigured due to burns, while his sister wears a mask, as the boy is told her burns were even more severe. In addition, the grandmother is blind, and the brother has some sort of cognitive disability. Little mention (though some) is made of how the family gets food and other supplies in their underground living arrangements. As the book proceeds, we come to understand an underlying tension in the family, and then the author takes us back prior to the boy's birth, when the family lived above ground, and in the process unravels all the mysteries - why the brother is disabled, why the family suffered burns, why the sister is wearing a mask, and how the family gets food and supplies.

As that mystery is unraveled, we are then transported back to the present time to see how it all resolves itself as the boy, receiving "mixed" messages leading to a somewhat false misunderstanding of reality (which, to be fair, he's live his entire life underground only knowing those 5 people), makes an effort to leave.

This is a hard book to review without spoilers (and I try to never have spoilers), but suffice to say that the book is dark, and some may even call it creepy (and not in a good way). As a result, the book presents a sort of moral question to the reader, about what choices we make on behalf of our family, how are choices considered good and evil, and what makes a person good or evil. In the end, I think the boy's answer to these questions may leave many readers somewhat dissatisfied, because it probably wouldn't be the result we would write, or want to see. But the author's contrarian ending gives readers a chance to examine the moral difficulty that occurs when faced with choices between family, and what is perceived as the societal right, and then ask - was any of the characters morally good.

Worth a read to examine that question, if nothing else.

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