Aiden LeDoux is a typical sixteen-year-old boy when the O’Connell brothers nail his father to a tree. He doesn’t believe things can get any worse…until three months later, when a mysterious light bursts forth from his face and heals everyone in his father’s bar, from minor scrape to terminal illness.Once word of this miracle event spreads, crazed townspeople attempt to force Aiden to use his … use his newfound gift to heal those they love. But Aiden doesn’t know how he did it. Or why. Or if he can ever make it happen again.
In the heart of a blizzard, in the throes of fanatical entitlement, the townspeople begin to tear the town—and each other—apart, with Aiden and his family trapped in the middle…
Shine Your Light on Me is a gripping tale that illuminates the ugly underbelly of humanity. From its tense opening to its explosive finale, the monsters herein are all too real, too familiar, and Lee Thompson’s relentless prose will leave you breathless.
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3.5/5
“He told himself it was just the storm.”
Shine Your Light on Me opens with a massive bang and Lee Thompson throws us directly into the fire in this story. While sometimes this can backfire and make us wondering just what is going on, Thompson deftly blends the tale together and allows the story to unfold, filling in most of the back story as he goes.
Overall I had a fun time with this book, even when at points it felt a bit disjointed.
The story follows Aiden, his father Jack and the principal’s son Bobby. We get dropped into Jack’s bar, just as a massive winter storm is about to hit the small town. We are introduced to a few characters, find out about the horrific reason Jack is in a wheelchair and then BAM! Thompson has Aiden explode with a paranormal/religious light burst that allows him to heal people of their ailments but ultimately strips him of his ability to talk.
The story then crisscrosses between the rifts that develop related to Jack’s condition and Bobby, who has had enough of life and has decided to blow up the high school.
Personally, the entire Bobby storyline was here nor there. I didn’t feel it added anything to the narrative and if it was completely removed I don’t think the story would suffer or be affected by it in the least.
There are some twists and turns as the story goes along, but with such a short page count nothing gets too fleshed out. Some aspects really benefitted by this and some suffered.
As the story moves along, the writing becomes vaguer and at times I had to re-read large sections to try and fully understand just what was going on. The climactic scenes (which there were a few of) all ultimately felt discarded and lost their emotional punch for me.
At the end of the day – I liked this story, I just didn’t love it. If there was another 50-100 pages for fleshing out, I would probably have loved it even more, but the writing style flows and I can see why this book gets the love that it does.
This is one of those times where I wish the 5 stars ratings had a bit more granular scoring. I’m giving the book 3.5 stars but rounding it down instead. While the book wasn’t bad, it was not up to the usual quality that I expect when I rate a book with 4 stars.
While I normally do my best to avoid all spoilers, there might be some small ones included here. The story jumps immediately to Aiden LeDoux and his friends hanging out at his father’s bar. The bar loses power and while the power is coming back online, Aiden unexpectedly emits a light of his own. A light that heals everyone in the same room of any ailment that they have. The rest of the story then deals with what happened and how people (those in the bar and the town) react to it.
In my mind, it’s a good idea and one that has potential. One of my problems though was that the readers were thrust into the story too fast. I was still figuring out who was who when I then had to switch to their reactions to what happened. And there was a lot of character depth that shown but not explained. During the light emitting, the story casually mentions Aiden’s father’s crucifixion. Wait a second, literal or figurative? That’s a more than casual line drop event. And it turns out to be literal! Then another character is introduced as a stepmother, “a wildly beautiful woman that so many men in the area craved”, but her relationship status is confusing because she’s at the bar with her stepson and not her husband. Personally I think those problems could have been easily solved by providing the readers with more story and character development from before the “light shining event”. Another 50 pages would have explained a lot of the history and characters and avoided that initial confusion. That would have also helped to care about the characters more. So much was happening and characters were reacting but I didn’t really care about what happened or who got hurt. I wasn’t emotionally invested in anyone because I didn’t really know anyone. I couldn’t sympathize. If the book had been a novel instead of a novella, that would have helped. And my final big complaint was the missing police. Through the entire story, the police didn’t show up for any of the deaths, crucifixion, fights, mobs, or home destruction. They do show up at the very end to take reports and clean up the dead bodies but that’s it. With everything that happened, I can’t believe that no one called the police until way after everything is finished. I don’t mean to be that harsh because I enjoyed the premise of the story. And while the town citizens’ actions might be extreme, they do make some sense. As I said at the start of the review, I have mixed feelings: good premise, key plot points that are interesting, not quite enough to make me care. I have another three books by Thompson on my To-Be-Read pile; hopefully one or more are novel length and I like them more so than this one.