Light and Air by Mindy Nichols Wendell

Light and Air follows its 11-year-old protagonist through a rocky path of tuberculosis and family upheaval.

Light and Air by Mindy Nichols Wendell. Holiday House, 2024, 181 pages.

Reading Level: Middle Grades, ages 10-12

Recommended for: ages 10-14

Halle Newton’s main concern at the start of fifth grade is how to talk her parents into buying a new lunchbox. It’s 1935 and she should be grateful her father still has his teaching job, but times are hard. She doesn’t realize they’re about to get a lot harder when her mother, who seems more run-down than usual lately, begins coughing up blood. Soon the dreaded diagnosis comes in: it’s tuberculosis. Mama is packed off to a nearby sanitorium for who knows how long, in hopes that the clean fresh air of upstate New York will clear her lungs.

That leaves Halle and her father to get along by themselves, but lately they haven’t gotten along at all. She doesn’t understand why he’s so short-tempered, demanding, and uncommunicative about Mama’s condition. Both test positive for the disease but show no symptoms—at first. Then Halle develops a cough, and during a desperate hike to the sanitorium to see her mother, she collapses and wakes up in the same facility.

“The path to a happy ending is rocky and lined with hardship, and happiness itself is often tinged with sorrow” (p. 181). Often our attempts to avoid hardship bring it on all the more. It’s not giving away too much to say there’s a happy ending to Halle’s story, but also real hardship for her and others. Light and Air is a glimpse into a past not that far away, before statins and penicillin and streptomycin ended the deadly effects of common diseases and people relied more on faith. All the characters are decent if flawed and Halle’s mother appears to be a godly woman, though there’s little or no mention of prayer.

Bottom Line: A sensitive novel about the everyday tragedies of a world not far removed from ours.

Also at Redeemed Reader:

• Reviews: Young people overcome serious diseases and bereavement in Unstoppable, Wink, Hummingbird, Sunshine, and The Fault in our Stars.

• Reflection: Thoughts about how Katherine Paterson dealt with tragedy in Bridge to Terebithia

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