By Sylvie Grundy
An evocative dissection of a broken mother-daughter bond that explores where we choose to place our value, worth, and the consequences it has.
Catching the Light by Joanna Horton follows a mother and daughter as they uproot their lives moving to an artist colony. As we follow their journey, a growing sense of unease begins building, as the colony—which goes by the name Isaiah—begins taking a toll on them.
The narrative follows Sylvie, a single mother to fourteen-year-old daughter Alice. We follow them and the decisions they make during their years at Isaiah, with Alice only processing the gravity of it all years later. By experiencing the story from both perspectives, we get insight as to when their relationship started breaking down and the defining moments which destroyed their familial bond.
We learn that Sylvie chooses to move to Isaiah for Michael, a semi-renowned artist from New Zealand. He represents everything that she longs for: love, fame, art, and self-assurance. However, Alice is affected in ways that Sylvie never considered, with her young daughter experiencing loneliness, vulnerability, and extreme isolation due to her mother’s choice. It’s a story with contrasting settings and timelines—one being the dark, foreboding backdrop of rural Aotearoa, and the other being modern-day Melbourne.
In this outing, author Joanna Horton weaves an intricate tapestry of loneliness, the complexities of family, the headiness fame, and the freedoms of art. It’s a nuanced and expressive look into motherhood’s loss of autonomy and the desperation which follows. It’s about the promise of another person and the eventual disappointment that brings. But at its core, Catching the Light is an exploration of decisions and consequences—with the ripple effects often taking decades to surface.
Horton advocates for the lasting nature of art while writing characters that feel nuanced and unpredictable. There is a constant urge to want to know more, to get to the bottom of the allure of Isaiah, of Michael, and to understand the depth of the dynamics at play. It’s a thought-provoking insight into the mind of a creative, despite sometimes lacking in-depth discussion about the wider industry or the separation between art and artist.
Catching the Light is a book that offers a fresh perspective on mother-daughter relationships and the complexities of old traumas. Delving into the all-consuming nature of creativity, Joanna Horton examines the freedom it grants us, while also questioning the price we’d be willing to pay. I’d recommend it for anyone who enjoys reading about family dynamics or those who need to satiate an itch for a genre-bending, weird girl fic type of read.
