Hello friends, happy Wednesday! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m posting my review of M.L. Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans.

The Light Between Oceans by: M.L. Stedman: Tom and his wife Isabel live on an island off the coast in Australia where Tom is the lighthouse keeper. When a boat carrying a dead man and a very much alive baby appear, Tom wants to report it, but his wife has other ideas. After suffering many miscarriages and a stillbirth, she believes this baby is a gift from God and that they should care for it. So they do, naming the girl Lucy. But after a few years and they return to the mainland, they start to realize the consequences their choice has made. This was a really well written and heartfelt novel. The plot was really well developed and had a lot of heart to it. The reader could see and feel both sides to each of the characters and that’s what really hit home; the author did an amazing job of painting both sides to each of their stories. It’s so easy to make one side feel like the villain, and there definitely were moments throughout where it could have gone either way, but the balance that Stedman used to ensure that didn’t happen was remarkable. There were moments throughout where the shifting of the different points of view took the reader out of the story a bit, but it was easy to fall back in with it and so that didn’t really deter too much from the reading experience; it was just a minor setback. The reader understood that there needed to be shifts in order to fully grasp what was happening. It did take a bit of time to warm up to this story so that’s why this isn’t rated higher than it could be, but that ending sure did take the reader and swept them away. As mentioned, these characters were wonderfully created; they had so much depth to them. The reader could feel all of their deep rooted pain and how that compelled them and made them do the things that they did. Their actions felt justified to themselves and the reader completely understood that, even if it wasn’t always the right thing to do. It was very riveting and fascinating to see what they would do next because they were all driven so hard by emotions. This made them come off as very human and very likeable, even when they did unlikeable things. In the end, the reader really liked how emotional this ended up being; how layered the characters got and how it all weaved together into an arc with a beautiful story.