Jessaka's Reviews > Lights on the Sea

This is a Lap Cat Book

As I was reading this book I realized that this is the kind of fun book that a cat would even make more fun if that cat was on my lap. Where’s my cat? I asked outloud. “She is in the other room working out on the treadmill,” my husband replied. The treadmill? Our new one? Working out? I went to see. And there she was on the treadmill, not desiring at all to join me in my read. She was fast asleep. Treadmills can wear you out, I thought and then I went back to my book.

I didn’t expect this kind of book and whatever its genre was, I was not sure. If it was a fable, you could not prove it by me, if it was a fantasy, I couldn’t tell. It was kind of close to reality but it was improbable that a house could slide off a cliff and remain intact. My husband, who was a house builder, said, “If could happen if it landed just right, but it is very improbable, and it would need air to hold it up.”

It has air to hold it up.

The couple who live in this house are Harold and Mary Rose Grapes, and they on a small island in Wales living in a two story yellow house that is now too close to the sea. Years of rain and ocean waves have caused the house be closer and closer to the cliff’s edge. Now they are being evicted from this lovely yellow house that Harold had built, and I might add, I also live in a yellow house, so I relate well to yellow houses. I feel sad.
So they begin packing, and the following morning they have to leave their little home. Instead a rainstorm occurs during the middle of the night, but they don’t realize that their little house will be in the sea by morning. They don’t even feel the rumble because they have both taken sleeping pills. Now those are some powerful sleeping pills, and this is the only time that I felt that this book was in the fantasy genre.

And by now my other cat has taken her place on my lap, and so we are reading this book together. Let Taffy have her treadmill; she needs to lose weight, and I have Mandy now.

Besides being a wild adventure, this book is also about redemption. Harold had gone fishing with his son one day, and the boat capsized. The son died, and Mary Rose blames him for their son’s death.

So now they are on the sea in their little houseboat. It floats because part of the island came with it, a volcanic large rock that has enough air in it to cause the house to float. And the ocean is carrying them out to sea. How will they survive?

I got caught up in a conversation with my husband about this book. Can you turn a motor into a generation and can the sea currents make electricity with this generator? What is a guy line? Yes. And a guy line is a cable that holds a ships mast. He knows these things because he was once a commercial fisherman.

So now they are bobbing on the sea trying to find food and electricity to make water and to light the house. Can you imagine what it would look like to anyone on the sea who sees this two story yellow house with lights on, bobbing up and down on the sea just going with the flow of the ocean currents?

My last question to my husband was, “Can you make the house move in a different direction if you open the windows on one side of the house?” “It would be like a sail. It is possible to move it some.” So see, this book is not really a fantasy at all.

And then he said the unexpected, “I want to read this book too.” And I thought of how over the last 30 years we have only read two books together, both he had read first and loved, “Lord of the Rings” and “Gold River Canyon’s Dead.” But I beat him to this one.