Between Two Worlds

Among other worthy preoccupations, Joan Thomas’s first novel, Reading by Lightning, explores the potent fantasy of being snatched from familiar surroundings and deposited in a completely alien realm, far from home. That is, I think, a common childhood conception, and one that strikes most of us even now as alternately terrifying and tantalizing.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s (including Thomas), nightmares of sudden and terrible change were fuelled by warnings of imminent nuclear holocaust on our black-and-white TV screens. However, television of that time also offered happier new domains accessible by magical means—including, in those perennial broadcasts of the movie The Wizard of Oz, the literal expedient of being blown out of a monochromatic Kansas landscape and into a multi-coloured dream.

In Reading by Lightning, young Lily Piper is a child of the Great Depression, born too soon for duck-and-cover drills...