Thirteen year old Lyra Aveline Reynolds never expected to survive her mother. She certainly never expected to end up in foster care, ripped from the small, familiar rhythms of her childhood, burdened with grief too big for her words, and a silence too loud to escape. After losing her father and older sister in a tragic accident years earlier, Lyra had learned to carry sorrow like second skin. But now, with her mother gone and no family left to claim her, she is placed in the care of strangers and sent to a summer church retreat deep in the Alberta countryside.
Willows Rise was supposed to be temporary. A distraction. A holding space until the next inevitable goodbye. But from the moment she arrives, something stirs, a subtle, unfamiliar tug beneath her grief. The hills whisper. The firelight flickers with more than warmth. And in the stillness between group games, awkward bunkmates, and chapel songs she doesn't want to sing, Lyra begins to sense something else at work. Something deeper. Older. Waiting.
Struggling with undiagnosed autism and dyslexia, Lyra has always felt like the outsider, too quiet, too strange, too much. But in this space of lanterns and letters, journal pages and songs, she finds unlikely friends who carry secrets of their own. A girl named Emily who once stood on this very hill as a grieving child. A boy who sees through Lyra's silence. And a scarf in a box that leads her toward a truth she didn't know she was missing.
As Lyra wrestles with her crumbling faith, the burden of memory, and the aching question of why God feels so far away, she begins to learn that healing is not a single moment of light, but a slow, stubborn flicker in the dark. That maybe grace lives not in answers, but in presence. And that sometimes, the family we find is nothing like the one we lost, but no less real.
Beyond Where Lanterns Rise is a lyrical, emotionally rich coming-of-age novel that explores faith, grief, neurodivergence, and quiet resilience. Set in the early 2000s, before the noise of social media, it captures the deep stillness of summer, the weight of memory, and the tender, often broken ways young people learn to rebuild what's been shattered.
This is the first book in The Lightkeeper Series, a multi-generational journey through loss, light, and legacy. Each story invites readers to sit in the silence, honour what hurts, and carry the light forward, one flicker at a time.
