Did photography replace an absence in her life or expose the truth of her heart’s emptiness?
While growing in confidence as a photographer, eighteen-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele’s personal life is at a crossroads. Hoping she’s put an unfortunate romantic longing behind her as “water under the bridge,” she exiles herself to Milwaukee to operate photographic studios for those owners who have fallen ill with mercury poisoning.
Jessie gains footing in her dream to one day operate her own studio and soon finds herself in other Midwest towns, pursuing her profession. But even a job she loves can’t keep painful memories from seeping into her heart when the shadows of a forbidden love threaten to darken the portrait of her life.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Sexual Content - 1/5
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Violence - 0/5
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Language - 0/5
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Drugs and Alcohol - 0/5
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Summary
Overall Here I sit, wishing it hadn't ended. That is how a well written novel often leaves me. Jane Kirkpatrick writes consistently excellent stories with complicated story lines and honest relational struggles. There is nothing mammypamby about her books. An Absence So Great is a sequel novel to A Flickering Light. Both books together capture the story of Jane's real grandmother, Jessie Gaebele, a young woman who had an artistic passion for photography in a time when career women were only just beginning to be accepted. Both books deal with her struggles to make a place for herself in the world of photography, while at the same time struggling with a forbidden attraction to her much older, married mentor. What makes Mrs. Kirkpatrick's books so outstanding is her ability to infuse real life messy circumstances into her stories, yet she doesn't sugarcoat her characters' struggles of overcoming or maybe just coming to terms with those same messy circumstances. Her characters words and thoughts and struggles are believable, and the plot lines are not predictable.