A review by emmaward55
The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan

reflective sad
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.5

Their future is a forgone conclusion, their fate is set in stone… or is it?


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This is a book best suited to anyone who has recently returned home, or for anyone in the mood for a reflective and somber tone throughout their reading experience. 

It’s sad in its inevitability, but perhaps sadder than literally petrifying and becoming your own grave’s monument is the more soulful instance of a pre-determined outcome: 
Both Mara and Islay leave the island, and both are wrenched back by the red string that is their love for their parents. 

It speaks of the price of freedom, in which we can be wild and unattached, but at the cost of forsaking our ties to the people and places we love. Neither Mara nor Islay were ever truly free. This, coupled with the relative lack of detail given to the reader about the time spent away, adds to the sense that leaving the island is only an interlude in a three act play. 

I think a lot of people can find a mirror of their own lives in this book. So many of us as young people will leave the community that we grew up in (either for university, work, or to move in with friends or partners) and yet almost as many of us return to our familial homes like waves receding into the ocean. I’ve been that person and like Islay I found a renewed love for the aspects of my home that make it unique. 

You could make the argument that the tumultuous climax that reverts so much of the island back to its beginnings is a heavy-handed metaphor. The island stays the same, the people do not. Perhaps it isn’t possible for a place to change, perhaps it’s only society that can. Mara, Pearl and Islay are left with the bones of a legacy, the work of those who came before is gone, irrelevant. It is up to them to decide how to play with the hand they’ve been dealt. As the ending suggests, their future is no longer set in stone. 
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