Breakaway Books

Authored by J.R. Dawson; Published July 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World contains a great magnitude of grief in its story of a ferryman of souls and his adopted daughter. Even though the mythology behind it feels incomplete, its emotional weight is raw and real.

In The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, Chicago resident Charlie is struggling to cope with the violent death of her sister Sam in a mass shooting which has left her literally seeing ghosts. She stumbles upon a lighthouse at the shore of Lake Michigan, a waystation for the dead on the way to the afterlife, where she meets the ferryman of souls Harosen and his daughter Nera. As Nera prepares to take over control of the lighthouse, she finds herself falling in love with Charlie, seeing the dead spirits she guides as people for the first time, and wondering what a life outside the lighthouse could look like. But lurking in Chicago is a demon who calls to Charlie and seeks nothing short of the destruction of the lighthouse and its keepers…

This novel is an unflinching look at the type of grief that drowns a person. At times, it was difficult to read, with Charlie teeters on the edge of not wanting to live anymore, and her father, clearly adrift, m unable to function normally. It struck me as a realistic response to horrific tragedy, and I appreciated that the novel acknowledged that there is no timeline for grief and how it can eat you up and make everything seem gray and pointless. Charlie’s jagged sadness provides a strong contrast to Nera and her father, who barely see the souls that they shepherd as human at all and definitely do not grieve for them. There is something beautiful about the way that Charlie invites Nera to see each soul with whom she crosses paths, to listen to them, to make them feel like they have been witnessed, one last time. In turn, Nera’s enthusiasm for the physicality of life, which she encounters for the very first time, is a balm to the grief that Charlie is fighting. Who among us couldn’t use a reminder that, in spite of the bitterness and pain life can throw at us, it also contains such small joys as the taste of fresh pizza and the feel of snow on the skin?

In terms of the nitty gritty of world construction, though, this novel threw me for a loop. Harosen’s backstory is revealed slowly over the course of the narrative, so we know much of his history, but Nera baffled me. She is alive, but not alive; stuck in the way station for the dead without any recollection of a life lived and seemingly physically alive. She longs to enter the world, but how can she? Has she been present in the physical world before? Does she have a legal identity? What is the soul-shepherding power that she and Harosen share? It is repeatedly described as a type of light, but it seems deliberately vague as to what the power can accomplish. These details were distracting for me, particularly as the novel drew to a close, and made it far more difficult for me to find the conclusion satisfying. The holes kept the emotional resonance of the story from hitting with full force.

The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World is the novel to pick to explore grief, depression, and learning to live with them. Lean into the emotions, not the details.