Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this arc!

I was amazed by this story and related so much that it made my heart break a bit, but in a good way.
Growing up and moving away from your parents is never easy and the guilt and heartache are endless, but it's so important to not lose yourself in that and not forget to keep living.
Loved this book!

This was my first ARC provided by Netgalley, and for that I am extremely thankful ❤️

This book was very relatable, it explored the duality of living the “American Dream” from the POV of an international student from Brazil, and through the lens of a mother-daughter relationship. I found it really touching and real whenever the two of them would speak of their lives and how divergent they have become, telling each other how much they missed each other, and sharing bits and pieces of their new reality living alone.

The daughter’s routines and thoughts were a very good representation of what it feels to move abroad all by yourself at a young age, and feeling extremely lonely, while also being grateful for the experiences and opportunities you’re getting that you wouldn’t have had you stayed in your comfort zone.

The only thing I was not quite into was the writing style, although I understood what the author was trying to do with having a third person narrator and almost detaching the characters out of the story as if we were seeing their lives unfold without much context or a concise storyline. However, I do believe for a short book like this, it was well conceived.

It for sure made me think of the times when I was abroad all by myself, without the ones I love, chasing a dream. It is a bittersweet milestone for sure!

I am very interested in exploring Brazilian literature and this was such a great addition to my list! the characters felt lived in and humane. I look forward to more from this author.

A short but full-bodied novel, spilling over with emotion, love, connection and longing.

★★★★

A daughter travels from Brazil to Vermont to pursue a university degree, grappling with different emotions along the way and desperately reaching for connection with her mother back home. Keeping in touch via Skype in the evenings, ‘Blue Light Hours’ narrates the mother and daughter relationship through computer screens.

This book encompassed some incredible themes packed into its 192 pages, without feeling packed whatsoever. We encounter love, grief, loneliness, desperation for connection, distance, depression, guilt and hope in Lobato’s prose-like writing, against such a normal backdrop of university life. Lobato has a magical knack for highlighting the beauty and meaning in normal life. I can best and only describe it as the feeling you get when going about an average day to day task, such as making a coffee or eating breakfast, and stopping to take notice of, and appreciate your surroundings: the sun or a breeze. This novel truly makes time stand still.

She has a wonderful way of portraying a daughter, feeling as though you are not quite doing enough, or just falling short, and trying to juggle so many expectations - a feeling I can relate to from my time at University. I also loved the insight into life as an international student and felt that the daughter is such a representation of bravery in all that she pushes herself to do.

I’m not sure whether it was intentional, or whether I just kept noticing because of the books title, but I loved how often Lobato used the colour blue throughout, contributing to the ebb and flow between emotions and feeling within the story. For me, colour played such an important part in illustrating this story.

‘Blue Light Hours’ is available on 15th October 2024. Thankyou to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for allowing me to read this fabulous advanced readers copy.

Review to go live on https://www.instagram.com/marsmalonereads/ on Thursday 18th April 2024.

Huge thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

This book tore me apart. As a son, I will never understand the relationship a mother has with their daughter. But as the son of a mother who loved him dearly, and the father of a daughter who I love completely, the yearning, pain and guilt that comes with love that is spread over a great distance, is something I could relate to, deeply.

This book just makes you feel. You feel it all, from both sides of the relationship. The sadness, the hope, the joy; it’s all so rooted in a love that is simple and understated but powerful and defining.

Lobato did an incredible job of portraying that part of your life when you’re not only coming into your own, but also when you’re starting to see your parents, not just as your parents, but as people who have a life of their own that they live, while being your parent. Reconciling the need for independence with the desire to remain loyal to the people who cared for you; showing them your appreciation and reminding them that they’re not forgotten, all while trying to build something for yourself- these are complex problems rooted so deeply in the love between a parent and child that I have never seen so expertly put into words. All the while, the writing was simple and beautiful to read.

I can’t wait to buy a physical copy of this book and to read it again. If I had to compare it to something, it reminded me a lot of the movie “Past Lives,” with the romantic love replaced with the love of a mother and daughter.

A very easy five stars and definitely a book I’ll be recommending.

“You gave me a beautiful pond. I want you to have the ocean.”

4.5 stars! ⭐️ I loved this so much more than I expected myself to. The writing was simple but powerful, and created such a sense of cosy nostalgia for me. I kept writing down quotes because there would be these little sentences that beautifully summarized such big feelings.

We witness a mother daughter relationship in a period of change and growth. The daughter moves overseas from Brazil to America while her mother stays put. Both of them feeling untethered and afraid at times, but figuring out how to take up more space and feel out their identity with and without the other.

I moved overseas for university when I was 19, and this story felt so familiar to me. I remember clearly those feelings of figuring out my identity away from my family, and forming an adult relationship and friendship with my parents. This book captured all these complex experiences and feelings so beautifully and succinctly!

Thank you to Bruna Dantas Lobato, Grove Atlantic, and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. This is one I will be recommending to my mum!

Bruna opened up my heart and filled it with nostalgia. Filled it with this yearning for a relationship with my parents that I was never able to experience. Balancing both youthful dreams, independence, and contrasting co-dependency and long distance relationships, Bruna brings a character-driven narrative that needs no plot as its a pool of emotion. You will feel so much underneath the glow of Blue Light Hours.

Blue light Hours is a beautiful story about a mother and a daughter. One in Brazil, one in Vermont, connected by Skype in the blue light hours, which for me, felt a little magical. The dynamics between the mother and daughter, adulthood, and loneliness is relatable, making me think of my own mother who is not separated by a screen and ocean but who I still don’t call enough. It a lot of ways, it still feels like a short story, I wish I knew more about the daughter and the life that she builds with her friends. I wish I knew more about how the mother spent her days and her true inner thoughts about her daughter leaving when she never got to.

“I understood then that I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw. That I would need as much time for telling as I would need for living.”

A Skype call between mother and daughter has never seemed so beautiful and noteworthy. With the daughter four thousand miles from home, living in a small dorm room in Vermont, and a mother left behind in Brazil, both prioritize keeping in touch.
Skype keeps them tethered to one another and becomes necessary in their daily lives as they try to hang on to what they know.

I initially thought this would be a slightly stagnating novel, but I was hooked from the first page. The plot and characters are so beautiful and heartbreakingly written. Reading like poetry, each word became a gift as the novel progressed. I seriously have nothing but praise for the author.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Relatable and emotional for an expat from a southern European country like me! I really connected emotionally with it by the end of the story and adored the last few chapters especially and the perspective of the mother. Loved it!

a domestic, slow-moving read detailing the bond between a mother and a daughter separated by circumstance and life. i found it to be quite captivating even though there wasn't much going on, like i said, it is rather slow. it is more of a 'slice of life' sort of read than a very plot heavy book- regardless, i still enjoyed it. the yearning and the inexplicable love from a mother to a daughter, the cultural difference and disconnect were all poignant and well-conveyed. i normally dislike books without quotation marks, though i do understand it often is stylistic and invokes a different emotion than when using quotation marks, i thought the lack of them in this book fits the overall voice and register well. i enjoyed this. thank you for the arc!

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.