About The Effects of Light

"Here's a question, Pru. If you could use these pictures to tell a story, what would it be?"

It's a hard question. I guess the story would be me, but I can tell she wants more, wants to know what the story would be that I'd tell about myself. And what is that story? I don't know it yet. So I tell her, "It's about the changes in me. You've been taking pictures of me since I was three. And now I'm ten. And someday I'll be a teenager and then a grown-up with babies. That's the story. Like the first pictures of me are almost when I'm still a baby, when I haven't done anything exciting yet, or brave, when I don't even know you that well, when I don't even have a favorite kind of food. And then later, now, you can see those ways I'm more myself, more grown. And the cool thing is you'll take just as many pictures this year and next year, and every time, the pictures will be one more piece of the puzzle."

Throughout their childhood, Myla and Pru Wolf pose for a haunting series of photographs, many involving nudity. Young, beautiful, and motherless, the sisters bond fiercely in their shared sense of loss, unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and status as favorite subjects for family friend and photographer Ruth Handel. The photographs fire each girl's psyche with a sense of artistic accomplishment.

Until their world irrevocably shifts…

Thirteen years later, Myla receives a mysterious communication that calls her back to her past. Awkwardly fleeing the one man who has managed to pierce her defenses, she will fly home to Oregon—and receive a series of packages sent to her in measured installments. They are time bombs of revelations, artifacts that will force her to relive—and come to terms with—the event that changed her family forever.

Edgy, richly evocative, and profoundly moving, The Effects of Light is an unforgettable debut novel, a story drenched in luminous epiphany and unexpected truth.