“Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”
Child of Light, a novel written by the artist, poet, and playwright Jesi Bender, has certainly received its fair share of love. One reviewer likens the prose to Nabokov’s and calls one passage in particular as “concise and devastating an illustration of inherited trauma as you’re ever likely to see in print.” A cursory glance at most commercial reviews suggests this genre-bending literary novel — about science and spiritualism in the Gilded Age, and one privileged family’s toxic dynamics — is well worthy of love, praise, and attention.
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