A Darker Light

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library at
the University of Alberta.

A Darker Light presents parallel stories of two women, Sara and Sitara.
Sara is a travel photographer who fears stasis. She is slowly losing her
eyesight, and returns to her former home in Halifax. Sitara is an
acupuncturist who has a difficult relationship with her parents, but
particularly her mother. Each woman struggles with her predicament
alone, until Sara seeks acupuncture treatment from Sitara and the two
become friends. Ultimately, each one plays a role in the resolution of
the other’s problem.

Priesnitz has given much thought and attention to the twinning of the
two characters, and spends much of the novel illuminating their internal
struggles. By the end of the book, however, there is too much overlap
between the two, and both share the same voice. While the author has
built a solid structure for this novel, she hasn’t fleshed out its
greater depths; this results in a straightforward but surface quality to
the writing.

The characters, too, hover on the surface of the story, and while their
problems’ complications are detailed in the book, they read as flat
and too neatly solved. The novel would have benefited from greater
levels of subtlety. A more comprehensive edit and rewrite might have
achieved this.