The Lighted by Eugénie Giasson is a contemporary magical-realism / feel-good fantasy novel about seven handmade lamps that scatter across the world after a suitcase mix-up, then quietly change the lives of the people who end up with them. The lamps are meant to “bring forth the truth” because lies “only survive in darkness,” and that idea becomes the book’s heartbeat as we follow one family in particular: Angie and Johnathan, their daughter Willow, and the circle of friends and found-family that grows around them. What starts as a tender domestic story slowly opens into a bigger one about honesty, healing, and the kinds of secrets that can sit in a house for years before the light hits them.

The writing is direct, often simple, and it leans hard into everyday comforts: meals, small routines, gentle details of home. That can be really charming, especially when the book is letting you breathe with the characters instead of rushing to the next “plot point.” I also noticed how Giasson keeps returning to the sensory idea of light, not in a showy way, but as a steady thread that helps the book feel cohesive.

This is a story that wants hope to win, even when it walks through grief first. Angie’s wish, “for once, to know the truth,” becomes almost like a quiet spell that gets passed down to Willow. And Willow’s relationship to truth isn’t abstract or philosophical. It’s physical. When she lies, she gets a headache. Later, the book ties truth to memory and trauma in a way that genuinely landed for me: Willow presses her dad for stories, relives moments as he speaks, and eventually “sees” what really happened to her mother. That reveal is blunt and heartbreaking, especially because the family has lived for so long with the official story that Angie “fell.” The final detail, a pen engraved “With love to David,” is the kind of small object clue this genre loves, because it turns an ordinary keepsake into a spotlight.

What I ended up appreciating most is that the magic here isn’t about fireworks. It’s about nudges. A child named “healer” becomes part of a recovery that looks impossible on paper, and the book treats it with an earnestness that feels almost old-fashioned in a good way. Later, the story expands into a “foundation” idea, built around people working together to help others, which gives the novel a broader, community-minded finish instead of keeping everything inside one household. If you like magical-realism-leaning stories where everyday life is the stage and the magic is the gentle push, this sits in the same neighborhood as Practical Magic or The Night Circus, though Giasson’s style is more plainspoken and homespun than lyrical.

I’d recommend The Lighted most to readers who want a heartfelt, easy-to-follow story with a moral center, and who don’t mind a narrative that wears its sincerity right on its sleeve. If you enjoy found-family dynamics, “small miracle” moments, and plots where truth is treated like something that can heal as much as it can hurt, you’ll have a good time here.

Pages: 174 | ASIN : B0FJ8ZJQMF