All That’s Bright and Gone by Eliza Nellums was released on December 10, 2019. This book deals with love, secrets, family, mental illness, and the potential of inheriting mental illness. Six-year-old Aoife navigates life agains the backdrop of major family predicaments. Her mother is institutionalized after nearly causing an automobile accident because she has a mental break while driving. Aoife’s older brother, Theo, is dead. Aoife tries to solve family secrets with the help of an imaginary bear names Teddy.
The tone throughout the story is childlike, told from Aoife’s point of view, yet astute. Her childlike innocence and concrete thoughts are evident even during family crises. At times, the vocabulary is at odds with that of the usual six year old’s range, i.e. a bit too sophisticated, but otherwise author Eliza Nellums captures a child’s voice, mental processes, and the concrete thoughts children are prone to, like Aoife believing her mother when Aoife is told she was found in a cabbage patch. The reader is fully engaged in Aoife’s point of view as Nellums pulls the reader into the world of this child while she searches for the truth about her dead brother. The ending is surprising, yet wholly believable.
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All That’s Bright and Gone is available through:
All links in this article are Amazon links.
