Child of Light

"Patient, perceptive, and charged with a quiet emotional power." —Kirkus

Finalist for Big Other's Book Award for Fiction
Thirteen-year-old Ambrétte Memenon has lived her entire life estranged from her family. After a series of financial failures, they reunite in upstate NY in the Spring of 1896. Together in the new house but basically strangers, Ambrétte endeavors to connect to her parents through their interests: Spiritualism for her Maman and electricity for her Papa.
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In her pursuit, Ambrétte is drawn into a deep abyss of the unknown as she learns more about both death and the invisible pulse of the human spirit.

Bender's Child of Light is an engrossing and enchanting work, following Ambrétte's passage through a world both terrifically grounded and deeply mysterious. A sensual and attenuated reflection on the distances, on language and the ineffable, it is both ambitious and accessible, filled with an insatiable desire for something just out of reach. A melancholy, both romantic and mystical infuses the pages. A dark pleasure.
—Carole Maso, author of Defiance and Mother & Child

With enough anagrammatic and multilingual wordplay to warrant heady comparisons to Nabokov, ... Child of Light carries the kind of high-literary gravitas you expect to find rubbing deckled elbows with the shortlist for the Pulitzer.
—​Heavy Feather Review

I was captivated by this story... I suffered alongside Ambrétte to beautiful effect.
—​Kate Blackwood, author & journalist