Everything changed when Kara Larson's mother died. At nine
years old, Kara couldn't understand how her family, once so
strong, could shatter so completely. Her sister cried
herself to sleep every night, her brother threw himself
into life outside the house, and their father became a
stern, uncompromising shell of the happy man he'd once
been. A second devastating loss, her abandonment by Jack
Sullivan, the boy next door, convinces young Kara that
love -- at least the kind that strikes like lightning -- is
an illusion.
Now at 27, Kara is sure she has it all figured out -- real
love, the kind that's stable and secure, with a
professional golfer of whom her father approves. Dad also
approves of the Palmetto Pointe Junior Society -- so to
secure membership, Kara takes time out from planning her
wedding to visit Maeve Mahoney, a resident at a nursing
home facility. Through her unlikely friendship with this
charming Irish storyteller, and the tale of the 96-year-
old's first love, Kara is moved to reconsider the lessons
of her own past. And when Jack Sullivan returns to Palmetto
Pointe, Kara is forced to face the truth about family,
loss, lifelong dreams and, most importantly, love.
Patti Callahan Henry has been compared to every
Southern writer, from Anne Rivers Siddons to Pat
Conroy. She writes the kind of books the term "lyrical"
was coined to describe, and WHEN LIGHT BREAKS is no
exception. Characters quote Yeats and talk about matters of
the heart, and lush imagery calls the reader to a sandy
stretch of South Carolina Lowcountry beach, sun overhead
and waves pounding in the background. It's Southern
Comfort, straight up, no twist.
In the Lowcountry landscape, as two women from opposite
sides of the same sea meet, a tale unfolds that will draw
readers into the heart's remembrances - and the tender
awakenings of first love.
Though bogged down in the stress of planning her elaborate
wedding to a professional golfer, twenty-seven-year-old
Kara Larson still makes time to visit ninety-six-year-old
Maeve Mahoney at her nursing home. And as Maeve recounts
the rambling story of her first love back in Ireland, Kara
is driven to remember her own first love: childhood
neighbor Jack Sullivan.
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