Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato shares the experience of a mother and daughter as the daughter moves to the United States from Brazil. We see her learn how to be an international student at a college in Vermont while her mother stays in Brazil. They not only view each other's lives changing through the computer screen, but also see themselves more clearly in the smaller picture in the video chat.

This book reflected parts of my own life as an international student at university. I spent a semester calling my mom almost every single day to escape from how lonely I found myself while surrounded by people at school. In this way I was able to relate to the daughter, but reading the perspective of the mother, offered me insight to how my mom could have felt during all those video chats. Dantas Lobato created a story that shows the experience mothers have slowly losing their children to adulthood. The mother is written with so much care and empathy. Their eventual reunion was so filled with joy and sadness that I couldn't help but cry.

Overall a beautiful story that shares a relationship that grows and evolves throughout the book filled with loneliness and compassion all at once.

Years ago, I was in college, a very transitory period of my life, and living without the physical presence of my mother who at the time works at a country overseas. Back then, Skype was the best and most famous video-call platform, and due to not having WiFi at home I had to frequent computer shops. I wasn't a good caller, wasn't a consistent reach-out-er, you could even argue I wasn't a good daughter.

That said, reading Blue Light Hours felt intimate and heart-wrenching. Bruna Dantas Lobato writes about the relationship between a daughter studying abroad and her mother all the way in Brazil. In one of the chapters, the daughter describes the computer she Skypes her mother with as "the mother aquarium," where mother is, close yet so unbearably far away.

The titular "blue light" is a synecdoche for the light coming off of digital communication screens, whether that screen be a laptop or a phone. In the latter chapters with the daughter caretaking a professor's mansion, an emergency phone outside emits blue light. This leitmotif persists throughout the story--and what i love most about it is its specificity, how the color blue has been employed to represent the daughter's connection to her mother, a mother who is oceans away, living in the aquarium that is her Skype screen.

The daughter contends with how the distance is changing her relationship with her mother for better or worse, while the mother contends with the grief of remembering the loss of her own mother and now having her daughter so far away. She supports her daughter's growth as much as she can, as much as her health allows, and her daughter asks for a bit of her time everyday over Skype. The daughter experiences homesickness (mostly missing her mother) and on top of that, fear (mostly worrying about her mother), and eventually these warring exhausting feelings make her hope her mother doesn't answer her calls.

Amid these motley emotions, she's also dealing with adjusting to her life in a new country, and reconciling the self she's building in that new country with the self that yearns to be by her mother's side.

Later, we get a glimpse of the mother's perspective. <spoiler>She adopts a dog, and shows her daughter that she's happy, none the wiser that she's not fit to care for it. She returns the dog, and boy did it make my heart hurt as she looked at the new tears made by the now-returned dog "like open wounds."</spoiler>

We typically associate the color blue with sadness, depression; there's literally an idiomatic expression "getting the blues." This novel takes this association to another level by miring it also with grief, nostalgia, and distance.

<spoiler>Except during their reunion, when the blue light has come to symbolize the relief of finally being with each other again, face-to-face, no longer oceans away. A lamp in the daughter's room emits "an otherworldly, bluish hue," and then later just before her mother leaves, they fall asleep to the screen still glowing between them, "miraculous blue," which colors their scenes calm and serene and intimate, full of love. </spoiler>

I enjoyed this novel, and would recommend it to daughters who love their mothers, mothers who love their daughters, and everyone else in between who've known, or who yearns for, the love of a parent/parent-figure.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for allowing me advanced access to this title~

I loved this book so much, I read it in one sitting and I felt so deeply connected to the mother and daughter. My best friend recently moved away for uni and we video call most nights and I related to this book so much (painfully so at times!), I don’t think I’ve ever felt so understood by a book before. Highly recommend, 5/5 stars!

I think that Blue Light Hours will haunt me for the rest of my life. With beautiful prose and a profound sense of yearning, Blue Light Hours explores the beauty of mother/daughter relationships in adulthood, independence, academic pressure, the passage of time, and familial guilt. Lobato's novel is profound, heartbreaking, and warming all at the same time.

Blue Light Hours strongly resonated with me as a young woman entering her early adulthood with family on the other side of the world. I accepted and understood the unnamed daughter's simultaneous love of her mother and guilt regarding the intrinsic need to leave and foster her independence. Lobato masterfully represents the bittersweet experience of establishing yourself apart from your family and comments on the diaspora experience. Ultimately, this book is a beautiful, touching narrative of the cycle of mother and daughter, and I don't think I'll ever be able to recommend it enough.

I wish the best for Lobato's debut with this book. With no criticism to give, I HAD to give Blue Light Hours 5/5 stars for its gorgeous prose and heart-touching dynamics. It's truly one of those books every woman feeling lost in her 20s should read and I know for sure I'm planning on going home to hug my mum after reading this book.

This is such a beautiful heartwarming book. It made me think about my own mother a lot. A LOT. If it’s hard for you to hear about mother daughter relationships this might be hard to read, as it was for me. It was a lovely story and the author placed all the yearning the characters had within them into me. I wanted nothing more than to see mother and daughter reunited, for their two worlds to be made one. It’s bittersweet knowing they’ll be separated again, eventually, and it makes me think of my mom and our relationship.

In some ways it felt more like a book of poetry than a novel. There were so many beautiful things to inspect within the text, so many connections that could be made.

At first I was worried the book would be stuck inside the main characters head to a fault but that worry soon left me as I got used to the writing style and got to appreciate the prose more and more. It was limited to the scope of these two women but their relationship was rich and the the feelings were so palpable. I didn’t feel like I was missing out on the outside world because that wasn’t what mattered.

It was a lovely read. I think it was the perfect length. At some points it was the fact that I was nearing the end that kept me turning pages as it wasn’t the most thrilling book. But it was very emotional and I feel the story resting under my ribs in my chest. The feelings are still there.

incredible gorgeous important immigrant story of a mother and daughter connecting over the thousands of miles that distance them and how they both deal with the lonesomeness of that incomplete connection as they grow and change in their own separate ways.

Heartwarming. Insightful. Relatable. Informative. Wholesome. Fast.💗

That is what I felt while reading Blue Light Hours. This story is about a mother living in Brazil and a daughter living in the USA. They communicate over Skype, share life updates, and comfort each other. While separated in space, they are united in loneliness and struggle to start their individual new life chapters.
I loved to read about their stories, the writing style, and share a little bit of their life story with my own.

I could relate to a few parts of the story, even though I am quite privileged. But I lived abroad for half a year on my own, and I felt lonley and lost at times. I, too, was only able to communicate via Skype, and shared the weird feeling of missing out on their life stories. Nevertheless, my family was not alone; they had each other, which gave me comfort, but also made me feel even more alone on the other side of the globe all on my own.

As it is such a quick read, written like poetry, I would recommend this to anyone looking for something slow, yet deep. Something meaningful, yet not heartbreaking.

Thank you NetGalley, Grove Atlantic, and Bruna Dantas Lobato for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. Blue Light Hours will be out on October, 15.

Publishing October 15, 2024

Blue Light Hours perfectly encapsulates a tight-knit mother-daughter duo learning to live across the world from each other while adapting to becoming people on their own. The link is maintained through regular skype calls and Lobato does a great job of making it feel so tangible, so real.

Lovely story.

Thank you to the author and publisher for providing an advanced copy through Netgalley.

This is a poignant portrayal of the bond between a mother and daughter stretched across continents. As the daughter ventures from Brazil to Vermont on a full ride scholarship, their connection remains tethered through heartfelt Skype calls, a lifeline sustaining their memories and shared experiences.
The narrative beautifully juxtaposes the daughter's journey of learning and adaptation in a foreign land with the mother's bittersweet acceptance of her daughter's pursuit of a future divergent from her own. While the daughter immerses herself in the complexities of a new culture, the mother finds solace in the knowledge that her daughter is carving out a future with promise and opportunity.

"Blue light hours" is a beautiful reminder that distance may separate, but the bonds of love and support endure, transcending borders and bridging the gap between old lives and new beginnings.

Blue Light Hours is a captivating portrayal of the intricate bond between a mother and daughter navigating the vast expanse of separation and cultural differences. The prose delicately weaves together the tender moments shared between the young woman studying abroad in Vermont and her mother in northeastern Brazil. Despite the physical distance and the angular confines of a Skype window, the connection between mother and daughter flourishes, creating new rituals of intimacy and caretaking. I think this story beautifully captures the universal themes of love, longing, and resilience in the face of separation and cultural differences.

3.5 ⭐️

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley! It was a simple and sweet story of a Brazilian mother and daughter separated by the daughter’s full ride to a school in the US. They have a daily Skype call and their differences deepen as they are missing each other from other cultures. It ultimately highlights the pervasive and lasting bond of a mother and daughter. Very sweet and quick read!

Blue Light Hours is a beautiful story about a daughter who leaves her home to go study abroad, leaving behind her mother, her old life and everything she has ever known. Through the pages, the daughter will adapt and change, will miss home and her mother, will picture her future life in this new country and will feel bad for not wanting to go back.
This is a story you’ll find many people share. Being an immigrant in a new country is never easy, adjusting and having to leave some of your habits and part of your culture behind, your family and friends, everything and everyone you love… and only bringing a suitcase full of new opportunities and fear. This book will make you think about all these things, and more: how a mother-daughter relationship can last and stay as strong as the day the daughter left; how it takes two to keep it going; how each one has to understand the other and put themselves in their shoes; how they worry about each other; how easy it is to fall apart when your pillar is gone, but how they help you put your life together again, just in a new way; and how it all becomes normal when the time has passed, how they adjust to each other’s lives, and how they make it work even when they’re miles away.
This is a beautiful story about mother-daughter love, but also about self-improvement, and a great way to understand how it is like for a family where one member has left to try to improve their lives somewhere else, far from their family.

This book was so beautiful. I imagined my college campus and how I would call my mom daily, and I was only two hours from home. Bruna's mother and daughter pair connect via the screen since they are miles and miles away from one another. It was very interesting to see their relationship unfold. I loved this!