By Millicent Borges Accardi
This is a quiet novel that screams inside. Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato begins with an international full-scholarship student starting her freshman year at college in the United States: “I arrived on campus in the middle of the night and dragged my suitcase up the stairs. Though I’d traveled nearly thirty hours from Brazil to get to this remote town in Vermont.”
Awash in touchstones, the novel paints a pallet with a blue item dispersed throughout: a blue vase, a blue dress, blue paint, blue soap, blue cloth, a blue couch, a blue cloth, a blue agate coffee mug, a blue light outside shining on a pay phone, and most importantly. the ever-present glow of a blue computer screen that the daughter uses to communicate with her mother back home in Brazil. The protagonist narrator, the “I” is known only as “daughter” while the mother, also unnamed, is known as “Mother.”
The blue hour can appear in the morning and the evening, right as the sky is changing before sunrise or after sunset when the sky appears blue, the novel creates a sustained artificial “blue hour” by the casting of the computer light on the daughter in the dark dorm room.
On the Brazilian flag, the blue circle within a yellow diamond represents the night sky over Rio de Janeiro when the country became a republic in 1889. It also represents Brazil’s connection to motherland Portugal, oceans away, so it is appropriate that the blue theme in the novel carries out the color blue for the Brazilian night sky and as a symbol for openness, peace and harmony. In fact, in Brazil, blue is worn on New Year’s Eve to bring tranquility to the new year.
From the first page, readers are drawn into the story of mother and daughter, drawn into the emotional thoroughfare of a long distance relationship, drenched in the blue light of a Skype call on the computer. The protagonist narrator the “I” is known only as “daughter” and the mother who is also unnamed, also only known as “mother.”
The story at the heart of the novel is about distance: a mother and a daughter as told through the daughter’s eyes, when she calls her mother in the evenings and early dark mornings, initially reporting news and using her mother as a sounding board and counselor, but soon the daughter evolves into a friend for her mother and a confidant as they both sort through their changing adult lives.
Venturing to college is the first time the daughter has been on a plane, or been outside her home country and she is tentative and lost as she settles into a suite-style dormitory. The building itself is white and on campus, it is referred to as the Milk Carton because of its elongated white shape. The other students housed in the dorm arrive with loud colorful posters, flowery comforters, neon furniture and decorate their bedrooms brashly, while the daughter arrives with only a suitcase. By comparison, the daughter treats her room like a blank slate, furnished only with pine furniture the school provides and plain white walls.
From her dorm room, the daughter reflects, “I gave my mother long descriptions of the weather, wispy white clouds, hail hitting the windows like scattered applause, biting wind whistling through an already beloved dead tree.” As the daughter reports back to the mother virtually, checking in, sometimes daily, a distant connection between the daughter and the mother is established.
We learn that the daughter is the mother’s sole connection to the outside world. Both of them living alone for the first time. A pulling away begins in October, with this turn of phrase, after daylight savings time occurs in Vermont, “we were never doing the same things at the same time anymore,” the daughter admits to herself that “the world had kept on changing while I was stuck, obsessing over old books by Flaubert and Barthes.’”
The daughter, mostly confined to a dorm room, greets her mother who is mostly sequestered in a small apartment, both existing in confined spaces, paralyzed in time. Connecting in the dark through the blue light of Skype.
During one such call, the daughter suggests they drink together and the mother acts shocked at first but they both get drinks and toast each other and the daughter says, “For a moment things felt normal. . .What a relief. . . I thought. . .This was my friend and I knew her.”
On the surface, Blue Light Hours seems to tell the story of an international student on campus, eating meals with other international students at the group dining hall, trudging through snow, working at the university mail room, but, at the core, is a story of a mother and daughter coming of age, growing up together and pulling apart.
The togetherness comes from recapping memories of times they shared together in the daughter’s childhood, and the pulling apart comes in the form of the daughter learning to live in a new country and ultimately deciding to stay in the US.
Like the wild child from the movie The Trouble with Angels who decides to become a nun after graduation, the daughter, here, explores tentatively new spaces like the town, the forest path. and even housesits for an art professor during summer break.
Mid book, the daughter talks about staying in the US with a friend (another international student). She gets drunk on sangria and shots of whiskey at dorm parties. The daughter asserts near the end of her first semester, “There was something disturbing in my comfort, in how much I felt that I had always belonged here.” She continues, “I had started to think of my computer as the Mother aquarium” because the mother was always there when she calls.
The blueness spreads to the mother who sleeps on and sits on a blue couch. Like the Virgin Mary, often depicted as wearing blue, and “full of grace,” blue is a color that brings peace, grace, and security to the mother as evidenced when the mother takes ill, she is put her on medical leave and given “little blue pills the size of grains of rice to take once a day.”
The blue and white imagery continues when Sofia, the daughter’s friend, goes to New York on break and brings back a snow globe, saying “I thought you would be sick of winter by now,” as spring is starting to arrive on campus.
Tension is provided, not in plot twists or action, but in the emotional ride of what will come next? Will the daughter go home? Will she remain in America? Who is evolving more, the mother living for the first time alone, or, the daughter, discovering a new life for herself in far-away Vermont?
Covering the first year, the novel seems to end when fall begins for the second school year, but there is a coda, an afterward, where we get to hear for the first time the mother’s point of view followed by a chapter called “Reunion,” a meeting in person, in Manhattan, between daughter and mother, after five years. Discovering how to interact with each other in real life. Proving that–even in closeness–there is distance.
Surprisingly, they remain in the confined space of the daughter’s apartment rather than exploring New York City: instead cooking grandmother’s chicken soup, eating ultra-sweet American breakfasts of pancakes and waffles, sleeping, and, in the end, unable to communicate, unable to recapture the five lost years of Skype communication, they do what they can, in a heartbreaking act of exchanging clothes with each other, they become each other, “The daughter held the nightgown against her chest for a moment, then she headed to the bedroom to get her own pajamas, a plaid set she’d bought on sale at Old Navy. Here she said as she handled the bundle to the mother. And you wear mine.”
A story drenched in blue ends in blue with mother and daughter falling asleep on the daughter’s couch the night before the mother flies back home to Brazil, “the glowing screen sat between them. It bathed them in a miraculous blue light.”
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Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry books, including Through Grainy Landscape, (inspired by Portuguese writings) and Quarantine Highway, 2022. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, CantoMundo, California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant), and Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal). She serves as a mentor in the AWP Writer 2 Writer and Adroit writing programs. She also curates the popular Kale Soup for the Soul reading series.
Book Details
Title: Blue Light Hours
Author: Bruna Dantas Lobato
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Language: English
Paperback: 192 pp
Available @ Amazon.com
