A Spark of Light

Elizabeth is George’s 17-year-old daughter. George calls her Lil after her childhood nickname “Lil Bit,” while others call her Beth. Her identity as his daughter is only revealed to readers at the novel’s end, weaving together two seemingly disparate plot threads. Beth is traumatized by her arrest after her at-home abortion. She is naive and did not realize that taking abortion pills at home would be illegal and dangerous so late in a pregnancy. She also did not realize that she could get pregnant the first time she had sex. She exemplifies the perspective of a young girl who seeks independence but has been very sheltered by her father and her faith. She is angry with her father for his smothering, overprotective love and thinks, “Somewhere, distantly, Beth realized that it had not been sleeping with a boy that had made her a woman. It was not even the pregnancy or trying to remove it. It was this: being forcibly treated like a child, when she wasn’t one” (317). Her father’s inability to see her as an adult pushes them further apart.

Despite her anger, Beth still wants George to love her and fears that her abortion has forever fractured their bond. When he leaves her alone in the hospital, she thinks, “She had never felt so alone in her life, but that was her own fault” (267). Beth’s fate at the end of the novel is uncertain. Though she does not know it, her father is dead. She has been arraigned and will be tried for murder due to the illegal nature of her abortion.

Hugh is one of the novel’s protagonists. Like his foil, George Goddard, he is a single father whose wife left him. Though the men share some superficial traits, Hugh is motivated not toward violence and vengeance but toward attempting to save others. He works as a hostage negotiator for the police department and sees his job as “selling hope” and is not above lying if it helps him save a life (152). Hugh exhibits a deep and sacrificial love for his daughter, Wren. He wanted to be an astronaut, but when his girlfriend, Annabelle, became pregnant, he gave up those dreams to marry her and provide for his new family. When he discovered Annabelle cheating and she moved to Paris with her new boyfriend, he devoted his life to raising Wren and providing her with love and stability. In doing this, he followed the example of Bex, who raised him when her mother developed an addiction to alcohol. Unbeknownst to Hugh, Bex is his biological mother and was urged by their family to let Hugh be raised as her brother.

Early in the day on which the novel takes place, Hugh worries that his life might be stagnating. It is his 40th birthday, and he worries that “the rest of his life w[ill] be a slow march down the hill; that he ha[s] already experienced the best of what [i]s coming to him” (335). Though he enjoys his life, he fears that the future will be emptier and emptier. His experience at the Center affirms that his love for Wren and Bex are the most important things in his life and that life is fragile and precious. It also reveals to Hugh that he is willing to sacrifice anything, even himself, to save his daughter’s life. Unlike George, who seeks to protect Lil by overly controlling her, Hugh wants to protect Wren by letting her become an adult safely, even knowing that she will leave him. The differences between the two men exemplify the novel’s theme of The Complexities of the Father-Daughter Relationship.

Wren is the 15-year-old daughter of Hugh McElroy. Throughout the novel, she comes of age due to her traumatic experience during the shooting. Wren begins the day wanting to be an adult and separate herself from her childhood but ends it with a better understanding of what adulthood requires. She thinks that she began the day wanting to have sex and not wanting “to be a little girl anymore” (355). However, she ends the day understanding that “it [i]sn’t having sex that [makes] you a woman. It [i]s having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children [a]re told what to do. Adults ma[k]e up their own minds, even when the options [tear] them apart” (355). She watches her father make the decision to take George’s life to save hers and watches Olive and others sacrifice themselves to save her.

Wren is logical and practical, as evidenced by her skepticism about the teenage romances in Twilight and Romeo and Juliet. She “[doesn’t] see the magic in waking up in a crypt beside your boyfriend, and then plunging his dagger into your own ribs” (4). When she experiences her first teenage romance with a boy named Ryan, they plan to have safe sex, and she goes to the Center for birth control. Ironically, this mature decision ends up putting her in danger. Wren is very close to Hugh, who raised her after her mother moved to Paris with her affair partner. After her mother left, Wren did not miss her mother: “Part of it was because her mother had left when Wren was little; part of it was because of her aunt, who filled in any empty spaces” (289). She trusts her aunt with any things she feels that she can’t tell her father, such as her desire to have sex for the first time. Wren also loves science and wants to be an astrophysicist when she grows up. She and Hugh bond by stargazing and sharing facts about the universe.

Bex is one of the novel’s narrators. She is the biological mother of Hugh and grandmother of Wren, though they do not know this. She became pregnant at 14, and her parents urged her to let them have the baby and raise him as her sibling. When her parents were unable to take care of them, Bex took over and raised Hugh, putting her dreams of living abroad and studying art on hold. Bex loves Hugh and Wren deeply. She is a safe place for Wren to express any dreams she cannot share with Hugh, and she is a source of fun in Wren’s life. Together, “[t]hey [eat] dessert, and skip[] dinner. They watch[] R-rated movies” (86). Though Bex loves her family, she sometimes thinks regretfully of the life she did not have: “Bex, who had not terminated her pregnancy, had still lost a potential life that day—her own” (349). The regret coexists with the love and joy she feels when she is with Wren and Hugh.

Bex works as an artist, and her work is made of large images that are comprised of smaller ones. She sees her work as a way of creating meaning in the world: “That was what artists did, they arranged the unarrangeable into something that made sense” (214). Her art is a motif throughout the novel, representing the myriad small stories that are lost in the focus on larger issues.

Louie is an OB-GYN and the doctor at the Center. He is a 54-year-old Black man who was raised in southern Louisiana by his mother and grandmother. His mother died when he was a child due to complications from an illegal abortion. This and his admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., motivated him to become a doctor who performs safe and legal abortions in embattled Southern states. Picoult has said that the character of Louie is based on and shares many similarities with the real-life Dr. Willie Parker, a well-known OB-GYN and reproductive rights activist.

Contrary to the stereotype that being religious makes a person morally opposed to abortion, Louie is a devout Christian who is motivated by his Catholic faith. He decides to follow his line of work after hearing a homily preached on the story of the Good Samaritan, who waylaid his own life to save another. He thinks, “Science never failed to humble him, just as much as his faith, and he unequivocally believed that the two could exist side by side” (342). Louie also grapples with the heaviness of terminating a potential life and does not shy away from the weight of the decision.