The Taste of Blue Light

LoveReading Says

February 2018 Debut of the Month  |  In a nutshell: angry, witty and ultimately life-affirming coming-of-age story

The Taste of Blue Light establishes Lydia Ruffles as an exciting and original new voice in YA. We first meet her central character Lux Langley at her school’s end of year party, the kind of wild, uninhibited bacchanal that Richdene Art School is famous for. She seems to be everything many teens long to be – bold, confident, popular. But something happens that turns her summer bad, so that ever after it tastes to Lux ‘of tequila and ash’. What that something is, we don’t know; Lux can’t remember but she’s desperate to find out. It makes for powerful, sometimes painful reading, and indeed could almost be too angst-ridden but for Lux’s sharp, sarcastic teen voice which grips and intrigues with equal measure. 

Readers who enjoy this should be directed to The Catcher in the Rye or Plath’s The Bell Jar.  ~ Andrea Reece

A Piece of Passion from Anne McNeil, senior publisher at Hachette Children’s Group: “We are incredibly proud to be publishing Lydia; her voice is vividly unique. Whilst The Taste of Blue Light is by no means the same story as The Bell Jar, Lydia’s main character, Lux, has parallels with Plath’s Esther. Both are young women who are privileged in the opportunities presented to them, but both women feel out of place and suffocated, and unable to touch upon why they feel the way they do.”

Andrea Reece

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