The Lightkeepers

November 30, 2015
The strange and desolate Farallon Islands serve as the backdrop for this evocative and enchanting debut novel. Geni transports us to this jagged, treeless archipelago off the coast of San Francisco to explore a single house, inhabited by five biologists, an intern, and the narratorâa nature photographer named Miranda. Wherever she travels, Miranda writes letters to her dead mother, revealing parts of herself that remain hidden to the rest of the world. While she photographs the elephant seals, whales, sharks, and birds, the looming danger of the ocean and the islands themselves force Miranda to rely on her often elusive housemates. There is Galen, the longest resident, who is a shark specialist; Mick, the amiable whale biologist; Charlene, the young, enthusiastic intern; and Lucy, a private but determined ornithologist. A series of mysterious accidents and injuries augur more surprises during Mirandaâs tumultuous stay on the islands. Geni (The Last Animal) writes with the clear, calm confidence of a master storyteller. This is a haunting and immersive adventure, set in an unforgettable, wild habitat of its own.

Starred review from November 1, 2015
What truly separates people from the wilderness of the Earth they inhabit? Geni, author of the short story collection The Last Animal (2013), continues to provocatively prod these boundaries in her debut novel. The Farallon Islands are a rocky archipelago 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco. Now a wildlife preserve, they are rich in birds, sharks, whales, and seals. The only humans are biologists who live in a small research cabin. Whether the islands are, in real life, as treacherous, desolate, astonishing, and beautiful as experienced by Miranda, the novel's protagonist, is near impossible to know; they are closed to the public. But Miranda gains access to the cabin--and its strange family of quirky researchers--as a nature photographer. She is to spend a year capturing the crumbling landscape and copious wildlife of the historically named "Islands of the Dead." A loner by nature, Miranda falls in love with the place, and she stays in love, though she quickly suffers an assault at the hands of one of the biologists. More violence follows, and the question of whether it is wrought by human hands or the island itself hangs over the book like a fog. Miranda's travelogue, at once emotional and dreamy and rendered in crisp, stunning prose, is so central to the book that readers may at times forget the underpinnings of the locked-room mystery or brush off the question of her reliability as a narrator. And yet, at other times, the expository velocity is so unrelenting that the prose could almost get lost in the momentum. But not entirely--Geni may be unmatched in her ability to describe nature in ways that feel both photographically accurate and emotionally resonant. Natural wildness, human unpredictability, and the subtle use of literary devices are woven here into a remarkable, vertiginous web.

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Starred review from November 15, 2015
Geni follows her distinctive short story collection, The Last Animal (2013), with a first novel of gripping, talon-sharp intensity. Nature photographer Miranda has traveled the world to places of magnificent if harrowing extremes to capture life in its wondrously myriad forms, but nothing has prepared her for the wild glory and malevolence of the Farallon Islands. Not far off the coast of northern California, these small, wind-whipped, rocky outposts surrounded by viciously rough seas seem to exist outside time. Also called the Islands of the Dead and teeming with mice, bats, seabirds, and elephant seals as great sharks and whales patrol nearby, they are off-limits to humans, except for a small group of hardened biologists who barely acknowledge the photographer's presence. Miranda recounts the many dangers she faces, both in nature and among the secretive scientists, in undeliverable letters to her long-dead mother. This poignant epistolary habit in concert with her living life through the camera lens leads to discerning and affecting reflections on loss, aloneness, and the discrepancies between memory, image, and fact. As the plot turns violent and suspenseful, and the mesmerizingly vivid descriptions reach shivery crescendos of shocking revelations, Geni dramatically meshes the grand, menacing power of the ruthless wild with the mysteries and aberrations of the equally untamed human psyche.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)