pmcfarland

1. Story statement: Chiyoko and Ellie struggle to come to terms with their traumatic histories to be able to find a a way to move forward with their lives. 2. Antagonistic forces: The antagonist for each woman is her own internal resistance to accepting what she has lived through and overcoming new setbacks and challenges. Chiyoko, a visual artist who has made a career out of painting works that show the horror of the aftermath of the atomic bombings in Japan, is unable to paint or feel much of anything, while Ellie is still reeling from the suicide of her 22-year old son. Ellie is angry at herself, her husband, and God. 3. Title of book: The Frequency of Light 4. Logline: The Frequency of Light traces the unlikely friendship between two women in a state of stasis -- a survivor of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and an American woman still reeling from the death of her only son. Their tenuous connection serves as a catalyst for each to decide whether they are capable of moving beyond anger and grief to find a way to fully live. 5. Conflict Primary Conflict: A letter from an old love, Kenzo, a fellow survivor of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima in 1945, sends Chiyoko, a visual artist living in Mahattan, into a tailspin. She becomes immersed in painful memories of the bombing and its aftermath, all the while wondering how to respond to Kenzo’s invitation to visit him in Japan. At the same time, she is unable to paint anything new for an upcoming retrospective of her work, and is at risk of having the show cancelled by the gallery owner, which would effectively, in her mind at least, end her career. Secondary conflict: Ellie is lonely and is angry at God, as well as her husband, following the death of her son to suicide three years prior to the beginning of the novel. She and her husband have moved from their New Jersey home to create a new life in Manhattan, but she finds herself unable to do much of anything. Until she meets Chiyoko. 6. Comparable books might be Shawn Nocher’s A Hand to Hold in Deep Water (2021), Meghan Kenny’s The Driest Season (2018), or possibly Elizabeth Strout’s Amy and Isabelle (1998), all debut novels that explore emotionally complex relationships and delve into how people grapple with psychic wounds inflicted by past events. 7. Setting: Most of the scenes in the novel take place in either Japan during and after WWII, and New York City. Although Chiyoko is cut off from most of her emotions at the beginning of the novel, as she begins to awaken to the world around her, the vitality, sounds and colors of the New York begin to speak to her. In Japan, we see the world through Chiyoko’s eyes – the home that she loves, with her family; a wasteland filled with unimaginable horrors after the bombing; and the place where she falls in love for the first time under the graceful shade of the trees and shrines of Kyoto.