photosensitivity disorders

Teenager Viola Li and her sister Roz are selling bean buns at a science fiction gathering in Seattle when she suddenly collapses--she wakes up in the hospital to find that somehow she has developed an extreme case of photosensitivity (so bad that even ordinary lights can cause blisters), and somehow, in her senior year of high school, she has to craft a new life that will still include journalism school, activism, and the new guy who caught her as she fell.

Once Anna Lyndsey had an ordinary life. She was young and ambitious and worked hard. She had just bought an apartment and she was falling in love. Then, what began as a mild intolerance to certain types of artificial light, developed into a sensitivity of all light. During the worst times, Anna must spend months in a blacked-out room where she loses herself in audio books and elaborate word games in an attempt to stave off despair. In periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn or dusk. Eventually, Anna's unthinkable fate becomes a love story from which we can see light and the world anew.

Anna was living a normal life. She was ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. But then she started to develop worrying symptoms: her face felt like it was burning whenever she was in front of the computer. Soon this progressed to an intolerance of fluorescent light, then of sunlight itself. The reaction soon spread to her entire body. Now, when her symptoms are at their worst she must spend months on end in a blacked-out room, losing herself in audio books and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission she can venture cautiously out at dawn and dusk, into a world which, from the perspective of her normally cloistered existence, is filled with a remarkable beauty. And throughout there is her relationship with Pete. In many ways he is Anna's savior, offering her shelter from the light in his home. But she cannot enjoy a normal life with him, cannot go out in the day, even making love is uniquely awkward. Anna asks herself "by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children, nor a public companion, nor a welcoming home - do I do wrong?" With gorgeous, lyrical prose, Anna brings us into the dark with her, a place from which we emerge to see love, and the world, anew.