THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER SHORT STORY MANUAL

I'm not saying this kind of structure couldn't work for someone else, but personally, it just wasn't for me. While I understood why it was there and what it was trying to do, it felt heavy-handed to the point that it took me out of the story.

THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER SHORT STORY MANUAL

By the end, it felt like I was reading a manual on mind mastery, not a novel with mind mastery themes.

Though I knew going in that it was probably going to border on the surreal, the beginning set the story up to be such a straightforward fiction novel that when it switched in the middle, I felt completely caught off-guard. However, my main problem with this story was how abrupt the switch from a contemporary coming-of-age novel to a magical realism-type adventure was. Overall, the atmosphere of the main setting-Black Eagle-set a very clear tone for the story. Also, as little as I know about lighthouses, I thought that the descriptions of the lighthouse and its maintenance sounded very accurate yet easy to visualize. There was a strategic use of ocean-related motifs that were really well done. It was vivid without feeling overbearing.

The writing was overall very excellent, and I enjoyed the metaphor-rich writing style. But let me first start by describing what I liked about it. Though I enjoyed the book as a whole, it was not at all what I expected, and in the end, I don't think it was quite my style. The Lighthouse Keeper follows a young man named Sam as he apprentices for an old lighthouse keeper in an attempt to escape his fate as a rural farmer.

The lighthouse keeper short story