Elena doesn’t believe in reassuring phrases. Nor in the quick comfort of “everything will be fine.” Life, in the last months, has proven to be harsher than that. In Por donde entra la luz, Lucía Martínez Alcalde starts from an uncomfortable and deeply honest certainty: there are moments when reality squeezes the heart until it leaves it speechless, and pretending hope not only doesn’t help, but hurts.
The summer at grandma’s house doesn’t present itself as an escape or a solution, but as an uncertain parenthesis. There is no promise of relief, only time. And it is precisely there, in that space without expectations, where the unexpected happens: Elena allows herself to be surprised by a crack through which light enters. Not because she sought it, but because she has stopped defending herself.
The Crack as Possibility
The image that sustains the entire novel is simple and powerful: light only passes through walls with cracks. It’s not a forced metaphor, but a recognizable experience. Elena doesn’t rebuild herself, doesn’t fully recompose. She learns, rather, to inhabit fragility without turning it into identity.
Lucía Martínez Alcalde writes from a very fine awareness of human pain. She doesn’t aestheticize it or turn it into therapeutic discourse. She lets it be. The wound is not explained: it is accompanied. And in that accompaniment, something new appears, not as a conquest, but as a gift. The light doesn’t invade; it slips in. It doesn’t demand; it proposes.
Discovering Without Seeking
Throughout the summer, Elena encounters realities that weren’t in her plans: unexpected friendships, disconcerting conversations, parties that don’t distract, verses that aren’t forgotten. Between waves and orange trees, life makes its way without permission. Death also appears close by, without unnecessary dramatisms, reminding that fragility is not an anomaly, but part of the path.
The novel succeeds in showing that growing up doesn’t consist of fulfilling rigid promises, but in knowing how to replace them with truer ones. Elena breaks what she had promised herself not to suffer, and in that breaking, she discovers something better: a freer way of being in the world.
A Story for Those Who Don’t Need Easy Answers
Por donde entra la luz is not a novel of overcoming nor a sweetened tale about pain. It is a story of silent learning, where faith is not imposed, but intuited; where hope is not proclaimed, but allowed to be seen in small gestures.
Lucía Martínez Alcalde writes for readers who have stopped believing in automatic solutions and, precisely for that reason, are closer to the truth. The book doesn’t promise that everything will turn out fine. It promises something more honest: that even in the broken, even in the uncertain, something new can begin.
Por donde entra la luz, by Lucía Martínez Alcalde, is a discreet and luminous novel, that neither denies the wound nor absolutizes it. A story for those who have learned that light doesn’t enter when everything is in order, but when the wall has cracked enough to let it pass.
