Praise for Finding Lily:

 

In Finding Lily, Lisa D. Ellis offers up a lyrical--yet practical--first novel that so accurately depicts not only a woman’s first love, but her first loss as well.  As the narrator grapples with the death of her infant daughter, Claire slips between the surreal gossamer world of devastating grief and the unknown turf of the inevitable marital discord that accompanies the death of a child--as represented by that  “invisible line in the bed” between Claire and Jim.

        

Her husband is an attorney, she knows that--but she is still horrified that, even while her "arms still felt the shape of Lily in them," Jim tells her to be "reasonable," saying between forkfuls of homemade cake, "We can have another child soon.”

 

Although she is aware of what she calls "the grateful way he looks at me when he thinks I am asleep," Claire's anger incites her to retreat--alone--to the  lighthouse in the cold of winter.

 

Her thoughts and feelings about Jim are further clouded when she sees an image of Lily “suspended inches above the frozen sand in the cold air, like a dancer caught at the end of a leap from which she can never land.” The real question here is whether Claire’s grief--and the apparition of her daughter--will create another loss:  the loss of her marriage.

        

In the end, Claire must decide whether her ethereal child is more real and permanent than the foundation of her marriage.  In so doing, Claire's journey to the lighthouse resonates with the voices of women everywhere who simply want to love, and to be loved, even within the cold grasp of tragedy.  Like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, a novel more concerned with lyrical introspection than predictable plot points, Finding Lily is a must-read for anyone who has ever pondered the vagaries of human existence--as defined by both men and women. 

--Karen E. Peterson, Ph.D., author of WRITE:  
10 Days to Overcome Writer's Block