The Keeper of the Isis Light

The Keeper of the Isis Light is a favorite read of the year for me! It’s like if Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin combined forces and wrote a book aimed at a YA audience. It also made me think of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as it has a similar tone and themes that it tackles. In a nutshell, it’s a slow moving, (mostly) cozy scifi with depth!

16 year old Olwen and her helper, Guardian, are the caretakers of the planet Isis, and its sole inhabitants. They send signals to humans in outer space, reporting on the planet’s conditions. One day, they receive a message that a group of humans are coming to settle on the planet. It will be the first time that Olwen has interacted with other humans, and she’s eager to make contact. show more But there’s something that she is blissfully unaware of…

One of my favorite aspects of The Keeper of the Isis Light is the worldbuilding. It’s much better worldbuilding than you would normally encounter in a YA book. The descriptions of the planet are immersive and beautiful! Monica Hughes made it feel like a real place you could visit. And I loved Olwen and Guardian’s house, right down to the little details. Also, I totally want that musical dress that Olwen gets for her birthday!

The themes of the book are strong as well. Hughes tackles prejudice and takes the story in a direction I didn’t expect it to go. She also made Olwen a strong role model for young readers, and I loved her confidence and how determined and strong she is as a character.

The ending is a bit abrupt, so it definitely makes me want to read the next one to see how the series continues to unfold. I’m so glad that it’s a trilogy so I can spend more time in this world! show less

This was my favorite book as a kid. It held up well: the perfectly timed build-up of the plot, the vivid and beautiful descriptions of a high desert world, and the believability of the main character were all as riveting as they seemed when I was ten. Though the book deals with Serious Issues, as young adult books do, it doesn't offer any simple solutions, and the resolution, though quietly satisfying, isn't quite the happy ending you'd expect. It offers a moral lesson I enjoyed as much this time as the first: sometimes people suck, and it's best to just go live in a cave.

My lecturer booktalked this in class, and I just about ran home with it. Since the death of her parents, Olwen has lived alone with her robot Guardian on a remote plant for from earth. When a ship full of colonists arrive, everything about Olwen's life will change, as she experiences friendship, loss, and conversation for the first time.
I wanted to read just a little before bed, but I devoured the whole thing, desperate to know how Olwen would cope with the new arrivals on her world.
This story is beautiful, heartbreaking, and hopeful. I'd recommend it to fans of science fiction, or of romance. It's easy tore ad and the plot pulls you along, but there are some big ideas about the nature of humanity and our need for other people. I think show more this is suitable for reluctant and sophisticated readers. show less

Effortless read. Despite the fact that all major plot points are predictable from the first ten pages, there's an archetypical resonance to the plight of the heroine that's hard to resist. The novel ends on a surprisingly misanthropic note for YA material, which I found very refreshing.

4.5 stars! The Keeper of the Isis Light is an impressive YA sci-fi book from 1980. It is about 16-year-old Olwen who lives alone on the planet Isis with her Guardian until new settlers from Earth make a colony there.

The book starts in a fairly regular YA fashion and has some simple mysteries to figure out that keep the reader interested. But later on, there is a bold turn in plot and tone that I found very refreshing.

One downside though, is that the book doesn’t have much of a conclusive ending. But fortunately it is only the first book of a trilogy, so I’m looking forward to reading the next installments!

One upside of the book that I found especially enjoyable was the author’s beautiful descriptions of the planet Isis. She show more gives the reader enough details to visualize the world, but not too much that it is overwhelming. show less

First in a trilogy, this tells the story of the culture clash between Olwen, survivor of the family sent to the planet Isis to tend the beacon there and survey the planet for human colonisation, and the newly arrived colonists. Olwen's Guardian robot, her friend and servant, has adapted his charge to survive on Isis and this brings her into a serious clash with the colonists, with resultant heartbreak for Olwen, and sets up the situation for the next volume in the series.

There are some fine evocations of the alien planet with its different lifeforms and the wildness of the mountains, and Olwen is described vividly also.

Quite an interesting YA tale which deals with issues such as prejudice, attitudes to people who are different in some show more way, and how sentient a robot could become. There's also the background information of how humans have totally wrecked Earth and are now spreading out into the galaxy, seemingly without having learned any lessons from what they have done to the home planet. This gives the book an underlying thread of pessimism, not that common in a YA novel, at least of the period when it was written. show less

(Goldfield not permitted. The excellent cover that was on the edition I borrowed is not avl. here; too bad.)

Very good SF, especially given that it's directed at young teens & 'tweens, a decidedly under-served group. I kinda sorta saw where things were going, but it still surprised me in many ways. Thought-provoking and charming. I will continue to struggle (!) to find more by the author.