At first, I had a hard time reading because there are no quotation marks but I got used to it. I like that the story isn't the typical college life full of parties but more on the academic side, just doing-my-best-college-life. There's also the mothers POV which I like because I get to see her side. I don't mind the sudden change from first person to third person POV tho I hope it stayed the same. I think it will be more touching that way. It just didn't gave me that much impact when its supposed to be a heartwarming story.

this short book is about a daughter and her mom, and the way their relationship connected through skype because the mom lives in Brazil and her daughter is pursuing a degree in the USA. the feeling of helplessness because she knows for sure that she’s not living closer to her and if something bad happens to the mom, she can’t be there instantly.

it is very vibey and slow, following through the day-to-day routine of both the two main character and their thoughts, looking forward to their scheduled meeting to catch up on each other’s life.

for some people, this book could end up becoming boring since there isn’t any proposition happening, but for me, i enjoy this type of story so much because the writer could show many different emotions in very simple mundane activities.

so happy and grateful i have the chance to read this arc.

There are few relationships in human existence more devastating, loving, and powerful than that of a mother and daughter. In her literary debut, Bruna Dantas Lobato, lauded translator of Brazilian literature, takes a magnifying glass to such a relationship.

At the novels outset, our unnamed daughter leaves her native Brazil for an undergraduate degree in the US. At a college in small-town Vermont, she has to cope with the challenges that come from immigrating: financial difficulties, cultural and linguistics differences, the loss of her old life and the distance from her mother. Blue Light Hours doesn't give freshman year in college the treatment it so often gets in media, but the treatment it deserves. Instead of a glossy, party-filled romp full of sex and fun, Lobato delivers a much realer portrait. The protagonist is often lonely, stricken with yearning for her mother, and mourning the loss of her old life. She is devoted to her schoolwork, doesn't have many friends, and is often homesick.

Blue Light Hours is at times slow, full of long stretches of video calling her mother that the title is presumably in reference to. But the plot's speed (or lack thereof) is in part its gift: it is a true to life depiction of the daughter's college experience, and that makes it feel just that much more real. Having experienced Vermont winters and years at college far from home myself, many of the scenes seemed plucked straight from my memory. I empathized with the narrator so often because I have lived what she lived, but I think even if you aren't a daughter, or an immigrant, or a college student, you could empathize too, because Blue Light Hours is at its core fundamentally human.

The one element I have not yet touched on is that the novel is actually a dual part narrative. While the majority of its pages are written from the daughter's perspective, at the very end, we hear from the mother as well. This is where it began not to work for me. The point of view changes from first to third, which adds an odd distancing effect, and the writing quality changes and seemed to me to decrease. Further, the mother's section is so small as to be almost inconsequential. Though I think the idea of hearing from both the mother and daughter's experience is intriguing, it didn't feel well executed, and I think the daughter's narrative could have (and should have) stood alone.

I enjoyed Blue Light Hours when in the daughter's perspective, but the mother's really lost me. Despite this, I can't name another work that captures the mother-daughter paradigm so perfectly. Lobato as a voice is clearly one we will hear more of in the future, and I am excited to see what else she puts out.

3 stars

This is a lovely, delicate novel about studying abroad and, finding, shaping and becoming yourself away from the place you grew up in. Though there is much more ate stake than during my Erasmus in Iceland. For the Brazilian daughter, studying in Vermont is an opportunity she has to seize, a future she'd never be able to have back home in Brazil.

Mother and daughter are sharing a sense of loneliness they partially hide from each other. Daily Skype calls where they fill each other in about their day leave a lot unsaid, yet they are very necessary.

The being lost is something I experienced myself during my time abroad in the beginning. My family of course still had each other but being on your own can be trying. This novel describes emotions I had almost forgotten after I got the hang of it. In a beautiful language it captures the essence of starting anew somewhere else.

This was a lovely story about the loneliness of adulthood and the changing dynamics in a mother/daughter relationship. I adored the prose and imagery used in this novel.
I did think that the characters fell a little bit flat and didn't make me feel quite as attached as I would have liked.

3.5 stars.

This is a beautiful book full of love and longing. This story is about the separation of a mother and daughter. The mother has periods of utter hopelessness. There is little regarding her work only that she seems available a lot of the time. The daughter has moved to college in Vermont leaving her mother at home in South America. The daughter works hard at her job and her studies and is almost frightened to let her hair down: fearing that she will lose her visa and be sent home. They have nightly conversations about their day. There is particular emphasis on the weather as it’s so different in Vermont to that which they’re used to. Very little happens in the book but you feel the emotion of each video call.

I really loved this poignant, delicate, and touching novel about a student from Brazil traveling to the snowy tip of the US for school, and the lengths she went to in order to stay in touch with and virtually care for her aging mother back home. This book tackles subjects that could easily become saccharine or cheesy with grace and confidence, making the story utterly mesmerizing and compelling. I really felt the loneliness of the protagonist and her feeling of being pulled between the life she is making for herself in the US and the one continuing on for her back home. This is a short read, but one filled with lovely sentences and sharp insights, especially when it comes to language and immigration and all the ways everyone (even mothers) want and need to be mothered.

In this short novel, a Brazilian young woman attends a college in Vermont and maintains a connection to her mom through Skype. The strength of this book is in its descriptive style, such as how the young woman experiences the seasonal changes in her new setting and what it's like for her to view her home through video chat. Although not a lot happens, there's something subtle and poignant about the mother-daughter relationship portrayed and the feelings of excitement around what is new while also caring for the past.

Blue Light Hours follows the evolving relationship between a mother and daughter as the daughter moves 4,000 miles away from home to study in the US.

This story showcases simple, monotonous daily life, but it's so much more than that. The dream-like and emotional writing created an atmosphere overflowing with nostalgia and yearning that tugged at my heartstrings.

I found the writing style to be simple, yet so emotionally impactful. I think telling so much of the story through Skype calls can easily lean into being corny, but I felt that it was pulled off really effectively and really showcased the relationship between the mother and daughter.

As someone who also lives 4,000 miles away from home and all of my family, this was such a comforting and lovely read. I felt so much of my own experience within these pages, and I think that anyone who has moved away from home will be able to find part of themselves in these characters.

“She said, I sometimes have these dreams where I somehow know you're scared, then I wake up hoping you're safe and doing what makes you happy. Is this what makes you happy?”
― Blue Light Hours

"Blue Light Hours" presents a modestly descriptive interior that is gracefully monotonous. The threads of simplicity precisely encapsulates the comforting outline of deeply nostalgic and homely undertone. I liked the absence of a structured plotline. The unfolds like a series of intimate dialogues between two loved ones. As the readers navigate through their conversations, each character gradually reaches their own beautiful epiphany. The absence of extravagance within "Blue Light Hours" serves to highlight the essence of genuine human interaction. Here, there are no grand gestures or elaborate twists—only the quiet beauty of heartfelt connection and introspection.

There are many things that I enjoyed abour this book:
It portrays perfectly what is like living on your own for the first time and how new and consuming is the first year of college. However, the writing style is so quiet and the narrative is so beautifully mundane that it doesn't make it a stressful read.
I also really like the mother-daughter relationship and how the two characters are nameless, because I think that it makes the experiences more relatable to any international student navigating life away from home in a new place, whith a new language etc.
Lastly, I really enjoy its optimistic tone: even though it describes college life or a long distance relationship, there was always hope that everything will workout just fine.

Blue Light Hours follows a mother and daughter as the daughter leaves Brazil to study in America, and the two of them adapt to their distance. This book hits home for anyone who has left the safe net of home.

As an only child who hasn’t spoken to her father in years, the daughter shares a strong bond with the mother, and both are dependent on each other in a touching way that isn’t seen in many modern families. The daughter is studying hard, losing sleep, trying to save money to visit home, and is often overwhelmed with life. The mother lives with anxiety and health problems, and often has trouble filling the hours of her days by herself. Then the two of them find each other by video call, and even if their conversations aren’t always perfect, there is a sense of completeness as they come together again. These conversations are the heart of the book, where life makes sense again, where the chaos of life is eased.

The characters of the daughter and the mother feel so real, and the book’s tone is soothing and gentle, the ending beautiful, poignant, and poetic.

We’ve all been there – sitting in the blue glow of the screen that holds the image of the loved one we would do anything to hold in our arms. Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato is a novel about that unique brand of loneliness. A young woman from Brazil leaves her home and starts college in a remote Vermont town, leaving behind her single mother. The two women cling to each other through their nightly Skype calls as each learns to navigate life independently.

This novel is a meditation on love, loneliness, and obligations between mothers and daughters. It is for readers who enjoy slow, reflective character studies. As an only daughter who moved away from home, this novel felt personal. Are you responsible for the well-being of your loved ones? Are you free to create the life you dream of? Are you even allowed to dream?

The writing is beautiful and sharp, creating a sense of longing that lingers long after you’ve stopped reading. Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Atlantic, for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. Blue Light Hours comes out on October 15th, 2024. Pre-order your copy now.

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.