Places of Light
by Susannah Palmer Loiselle

novella

Upheaval, transitions, secrets, and hidden truths painfully revealed -- these are the tough adolescent issues considered and beautifully addressed by Susannah Palmer Loiselle in her novella, Places of Light. With tenderness and insight, The author takes us inside the latest in a long series of moves for Jason Meade, his younger brother Skip, and their father, John. As the boys deal with the expected issues of adjusting to a new school, making new friends, and establishing themselves in yet one more community, deeper, darker issues begin to reveal themselves through one clue after another. Jason is visited by puzzling and uncommonly realistic dreams that call him deeper into the unanswered questions of his past. His best friend, Sam, brings his own psychic gifts to the relationship, and between them, a present begins to make sense out of the conflicts of Jason's past. Loiselle invites the reader to believe there is always reason for hope, that impossible conflicts can be resolved, and that wholeness can result from fractured lives.

--Beth Evans

In Places of Light Susannah Palmer Loiselle invites us to enter the world of seventeen-year-old track star, Jason Meade, as he navigates high school in multiple school districts due to his family’s all too frequent inexplicable moves. Recurrent, frightening dreams of childhood puzzle Jason as he is unable to link them to actual remembered events. Questions about Jason’s mother’s abandonment of the family, his father’s troubled relationship with his own father, and relatives who are never discussed, take the reader on a quest for answers. Poignant and expertly plotted, Loiselle has a gift for portraying the struggles of a teenager dealing with a mysterious troubled family past. A page turner.

--Marilyn A. Westlake

Susannah Palmer Loiselle lives with her family near rural Locke, NY. She is a retired school and academic librarian and has taken many writing and art classes at Wells College. She has been a part of the fiction section of Syracuse’s YMCA Downtown Writer’s Program from 2008-2010. Her poetry has appeared in The Healing Muse, Play of Mind, The Wells Chronicle, Reflections Journal, The Wicker Coracle and others. “The Money Laundress of Cold Spring,” was included in, Women Celebrating Women Anthology (2008). Her chapbook, God Speaks to Me at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, was published in 2004. Her photography has been published in The Healing Muse and in Central New York Magazine. Her photographs were on display at the Delavan Gallery in Syracuse. She concerns herself with matters of nature, mysticism, politics, spirituality, individuality, and history in her writing and photography.