Flashlight

1st chapter is great. The rest???? I want my 15 hours back. I have no idea why anyone enjoyed this. Awful. Confusing.

This is an unforgettable novel. The opening is one of the most extraordinary openings in any novel. Fast and rich in setting, character, situation. The novel then switches gears to slower and steadier. Hang in there. You will not regret it.

“Flashlight,” by Susan Choi, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ‎464 pages, June 3, 2025.Louisa, 10, has been asking her father to walk with her on the beach ever since they arrived in Japan. One night, he agrees. He is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Her mother uses a wheelchair.Later, Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they moved to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family.But after her father’s disappearance, Anne and Louisa move in with her aunt in Los Angeles. Louise is seeing a child psychologist, Dr. Brickner. Louisa told the people who found her that her father was kidnapped.Now she says she didn’t say he was kidnapped; her mother made that up. The school reports that she is defiant and has been stealing. The story then goes back in time to when her parents were young.When the novel focuses on Louisa, I enjoyed it, but I lost interest in the sections about Serk and Anne. Anne blames her mother for virtually everything. She is a difficult adolescent and a difficult adult.“Flashlight” was originally published as a short story in The New Yorker in 2020. I think I’d prefer it as a short story because the novel seems to drag out. It was difficult for me to get through it.