“Nightwatch” by John Leax

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel. He writes in his Grace Is Where I Live: Writing as a Christian Vocation that for years he had wanted to be a novelist, not a poet, but it took him a long time to learn (from writers like Flannery O’Connor, who said it directly) that fiction wasn’t about writing about ideas but about people and story. 

Leax’s one novel was written for young adults. Nightwatch (1989) is the story of Mark Baker, a boy growing up in a small town. It’s told in disconnected segments – Mark as a young boy, at age 11 or 12, and as a teen. His parents are both people of faith, but Mark is wayward, falling in with friends who tend to lead him further away. But all of Mark’s experiences across the years are leading him directly (and sometimes indirectly) into the arms of God. And he fights it the entire time, until he can no longer fight.

 

John Leax

It may sound like a familiar story, but Nightwatch isn’t that at all. It contains an edge, a jaggedness that you wouldn’t expect in a young adult novel or a Christian young adult novel. But Leax had taken O’Connor’s advice to heart, and he told a story about people as opposed to ideas. And he let his characters, and especially the character of Mark, to go where they might go.

 

Leax’s poetry collections include Reaching into Silence, The Task of Adam, Sonnets and Songs, and Country Labors. His non-fiction writing and essay collections include Grace Is Where I Live, In Season and Out, Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism, 120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About, and Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World. 

 

In some ways, Nightwatch is difficult to read (thus my comment about jaggedness). But it reads like a real story about a real boy, a boy capable of stupidity and hurting others, a boy who’s running as fast as he can away from God but (very) slowly comes to realize he’s not getting away. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Writing in the Middle of Things – Andrew Roycroft at The Sounding Board.

 

The disappeared and the damned: A reflection on Roger Scruton’s neglected “grooming gangs” novel – Henry George at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Bridges of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Shrouded Veterans: Honoring the Highest-Ranking Jewish Officer Killed in Action – Frank Jastrzembski at Emerging Civil War.

 

Richard Weaver: The Conservatism of Piety – John East at The Imaginative Conservative.

“The Sin Eater” by Gary Schmidt

Cole and his father have moved to the Albion, New Hampshire home of Grandpa and Grandma Emerson, Cole’s maternal grandparents. Cole’s mother died from cancer sometime earlier, and his father decides it’s best to live where Cole’s mother was born and raised. His father has not come to terms with his wife’s death; it’s almost as if passing time has made the loss even greater. 

Cole’s not long at his new home when he hears the story of the Sin Eater, an old Welsh legend that seemed to have been lived by a local man. The Sin Eater collects a person’s sins, bakes them into a loaf of bread, and then eats the bread completely. Or so the legend goes. Cole is skeptical; it doesn’t sound particularly Christian to him. But there is a real connection to man who supposedly died in a farmhouse fire decades previously, and to several unmarked graves in the family plot on the Emerson farm, the same plot where his mother’s buried.

 

While his father spends most of his time in “the hired man’s room” above the kitchen, Cole becomes part of his grandparents’ daily life. He feels his mother’s loss as deeply as his father, but Cole has more of his mother in him, and not only his looks. He makes friends, he works the farm with his grandfather, he attends church, and he begins life at a new school. His father seems to be increasingly a ghost in the family, as if he were slowly vanishing with each passing day.

 

Gary Schmidt

The Sin Eater by young adult Gary Schmidt tells Cole’s story, and it is alternately tragic, sad, hysterically funny, and heartwarming. Like life. And sometimes it is all those things at the same time. Schmidt has a gift for characterization, and not only the main characters. And the stories his characters tell had me laughing out loud and wiping away tears, a reminder of the importance of stories in how we understand ourselves and our families. 

 

Schmidt, a professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the author of numerous young adult novels. He’s received two Newbery Awards, for Lizzie Bright and the Buckminister Boy (2005) and The Wednesday Wars (2008). Okay for Now (2011) was a National Book Award finalist. The Sin Eater was published in 1996. He received his B.A. in English from Gordon College and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

The Sin Eater is a wonderful story, full of humor, tragedy, pain, pathos, and life. You’ll fall in love with Cole’s grandparents and their friends, and you’ll find in Cole a boy determined deal with what life throws at him and keep going.

 

Some Monday Readings

Dark Tunnels and Moral Beacons - Bari Weiss at The Free Press.

The Government Spends Millions to Open Grocery Stores in Food Deserts. The Real Test is Their Survival – Molly Parker at The Daily Yonder.

 

How Did British Politicians React to America’s Attempts at Independence? Rather Poorly! – Sonja Anderson at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Conversation is an Art: Remembering Roger Scruton – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

"A Monster Calls" by Patrick Ness

Conor O’Malley, all of 13, is having nightmares. The yew tree at the back of their house becomes a monster. And the monster comes looking for him.

Conor lives with his divorced mom; his father has remarried and moved to America. Conor is increasingly taking care of himself; he makes his own meals, gets himself ready for school, and cleans up around the house, maintaining as best he can a degree of family normality. It doesn’t take long to understand why: Conor’s mother has cancer. 

At school, Conor had always been an overachiever, first to raise his hand in class to answer a question, always do well in his subjects. But his schoolmates and teachers learned about his mother, and they began to treat Conor with kid gloves. The more they do, the more he withdraws. Only the bullies pay attention to him now, except when the monster shows up.

The monster wants to tell Conor three stories. And he wants Conor to tell him a fourth story. The sicker his mother becomes, the more frequently the monster is showing up.

There is also the specter of his grandmother, who tightly manages her own world as much as Conor is trying to manage his. The two do not get along well.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is based on an idea by the late children’s and young adult writer Siobhan Dowd (1960-2007), who died from a severe case of breast cancer. Ness, himself a children’s and young adult author, wrote the story in honor of Dowd. The book was written into a screenplay for the movie of the same name, released in 2016, and was also a play produced at the Old Vic Theatre in London this summer. 

Patrick Ness

The movie starred Felicity Jones (Conor’s mother), Sigourney Weaver (the grandmother), Lewis MacDougal (Conor), and Liam Neeson as the voice of the monster. It received high critical ratings but did poorly at the box office in the U.S.

Ness is the author of several works of fiction for both young adults and adults, including The Crane Wife, The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men, and The Crash of Hennington. Born in Virginia, he received a degree in English Literature from the University of Southern California. He lives in London.

A Monster Calls is a moving, gripping story of a young buy trying to deny, deal with, and understand the collapse of the only world he knows. 

Top photograph: A scene from A Monster Calls at the Old Vic Theatre.

“The Edge of Over There” by Shawn Smucker

The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker is an extraordinary work, and I don’t use “extraordinary” lightly. It is part road trip, part dystopia, part quest, part Pilgrim’s Progress, part classic-story-of good-versus-evil, part young adult. Even more surprising, it is a sequel that surpasses its predecessor, and its predecessor,The Day the Angels Fell, was excellent.

This new novel doesn’t pick up where The Day the Angels Fell left off. The heroes of the previous story are, for one thing, is very different places – Sam is an old man beset with physical problems and Abra has died, leaving Sam a sword and an atlas. Sam is followed one day by a man, whom Sam suspects wants the sword and the atlas. That assumption turns out to be wrong; what the man wants is to tell Sam a story, the story of what happened at the edge of Over There, a story that involves Abra after she and Sam drifted apart.

The story begins in Deen, the valley town Abra and Sam grew up in, but it quickly moves to New Orleans. A five-year-old child is dying, her 10-year-old brother is hiding in a closet, and the child’s father is leaving with his daughter to go to the one place she has a chance to live. He has to bring a plant with him and establish it in a building. Or so he’s told by his doctor, a mysterious woman. The journey begins in a well-known New Orleans landmark – St. Louis Cemetery #1, and specifically the aboveground tomb of voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. 

Years later, Abra will make the same journey. With her will be the now-18-year-old brother, Leo Jardine, and an acquaintance named Beatrice. Abra knows she is charged with killing a particular tree – the Tree of Life, the one mentioned in the Book of Genesis that God warned Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of. Leo wants to find his sister. Beatrice doesn’t seem to have a purpose, but, with good reason, we, and Abra, suspect Beatrice is up to no good, and we turn out to be right. The three travel through the tomb and eventually find themselves in a forest, a forest that gradually becomes a city. A city unlike any they’ve ever known, a city where a great evil is unfolding. 

Shawn Smucker

In addition to the novel The Day the Angels Fell, Smucker has published three non-fiction works – My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The Edge of Over There keeps the reader reading. It’s an enthralling story, filled with bravery and courage in the face of deadly danger and undisguised evil. It is a story that inspires, and I suspect it will inspire you, your children, and your grandchildren.

Related:

My review of My Amish Roots.

My review of Building a Life Out of Words.

My review of Refuse to Drown.

My review of The Day the Angels Fell.

Top photograph by Alexandr Bormotin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Jane Casey’s “Bet Your Life”

Teenager Jess Tennant and her mother have moved from London to Port Sentinel on the English coast to get away from Jess’s father, a divorce, and the shambles of an old life. There barely three months, Jess has found herself in the middle of a second mystery (the first, How to Fall, involved the suspicious death of a cousin). A teenage boy from her school has been beaten badly and left for dead or near-dead.

The boy’s sister asks Jess to find out what happened, and to do that, she has to run smack into the face of the local police chief, a series of high school in-crowds, her old boyfriend and the boy who wants to be the new boyfriend. And her father shows up in all his obnoxious presence.

What Jess finds, in Jane Casey’s young adult novel Bet Your Life, is secrets, dark secrets, and danger.

Bet Your Life was originally published in Britain, and it’s surprising in several ways. First, the scenes and the dialogue, with a few exceptions, sound almost American. Second, the teenagers in the novel act more adult than most of the adults do (adult males, in particular, don’t fare well here). Third, this may be a mystery, but there are more romantic stories going on at any given time that you find in a lot of romance novels.

And, yes, the book kept me interested and intrigued the entire time. It’s a fast-paced read, and it’s easy to suspend belief and follow the story as it develops and morphs downs highways and byways.

Jane Casey

I understand what part of the appeal is, and why a lot of adults are buying young adult fiction. These novels don’t have graphic, gratuitous sex that is required in most popular novels today. Bet Your Life takes a dark turn but contains nothing graphic or gratuitous.

Casey is an Irish crime writer, and this is the second Jess Tennant mystery. She’s previously published five mystery novels in the Maeve Kerrigan series: The Burning, The Reckoning, The Last Girl, The Stranger You Know, and The Kill. A third Jess Tennant mystery, Hide and Seek, is scheduled to published in late August.

Bet Your Life is an easy, entertaining read right to the end.

Photograph: Guy Fawkes Day bonfire by Angie Perkins via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. Such a bonfire plays a role in Bet Your Life.

Jill Case Brown’s “Safe”

Bank (short for Bancroft) Jonsson is your rather typical high school sophomore. He’s tall – six foot four – and but not coordinated (or interested) enough to play basketball. He’s interested in girls but tends to get clumsy around them. He’s just gotten his driver’s license. And his best friend has just moved from their small Oklahoma town to Minnesota, and Bank is feeling the separation.

Oh, and his mother, Meredith, has distributed (or dissociative) identify disorder, meaning her body is occupied by numerous personalities. If you’ve seen the 1957 movie The Three Faces of Eve with Joanne Woodward or the 1976 movie Sybil with Sally Fields,  you’ll know what DID is. It’s a difficult disorder, not the least of which for the fact a cure is not known. Patients can be cured, but there’s no set path for that to happen.

Bank, a normal teenager living not quite the normal teenager’s life.  He’s become rather expert at identifying which personality has emerged at any given time. He also recognizes that new student at his high school has DID.

Jill Case Brown’s young adult novel Safe is the story of Bank, his family, and his friends. Brown tells a fine story, a story that respects both its teenage characters and the teenagers who will read it. I stayed wrapped up with the book almost start to finish; it was that difficult to put down.

What happens is that none of Bank’s friends really understand what DID is, and that leads to a succession of events that are life-threatening. Bank becomes the target of misunderstanding and meanness by one of his former friends. And his schoolmates turn against him.

Brown catches the scene and substance of life in a high school just right, with all of the emotional highs and lows (often at the same time), hopes, dreams and fears common to any high school experience.

For Bank, though, the experience is anything but common. Brown gets the reader inside his head, and inside his heart.

Safe is simply a wonderful story.

Illustration: "Dissociative identity disorder" by 04Mukti. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Travis Thrasher's "Gravestone"

Travis Thrasher has written a number of novels, in a number of genres – romance, suspense, contemporary adult and (borderline) horror. Last year, he started a four-part Young Adult series with Solitary. The second novel in the series is the recently published Gravestone, and I devoured it, and on Kindle, no less – the first book I’ve read on Kindle.

Chris Buckley is a high school junior living in Solitary, North Carolina, having moved with his mother from Chicago following his parents’ divorce. Solitary is a strange town, and the longer Chris is there, the stranger it gets. In Solitary, he has what he thinks are the typical new-kid-at-school experiences – the bullies, the looks, the giggles. He meets and falls in love with a girl named Jocelyn. Gradually he comes to understand that nothing is what it seems in Solitary. Nothing. And instead of small-town life, Chris finds evil. And evil finds Jocelyn.

In Gravestone, Jocelyn is gone, mourned and missed by Chris. And the evil is growing more intense. His alcoholic mother claims to be threatened – by people in their own house. One of Jocelyn’s friends and her family move away, suddenly. Another friend comes to understand what has happened to Jocelyn, and tries to help Chris. And there’s the pastor of the town’s big church, whose wife isn’t seen any more and who – as far as Chris is concerned – radiates evil.

It’s not all bad. Chris goes to work for an elderly woman named Iris who operates a remote inn, and she's completely different. He meets a girl named Kelsey in his art class, whose family is refreshingly normal. And the son of his missing Uncle Robert finds him, and wants to help him.

Part of Gravestone is Chris having interior conversations with himself, much like any teenager would, except most teenagers don’t have these kinds of experiences to live through. The novel is fast-paced and action-packed, and the story itself is riveting. Best of all, Thrasher is a fine writer. The creepy characters have just enough humanity in them to avoid stereotypes, while the good characters have their flaws and failings. And the novel keeps packing a punch and never stops.

Gravestone may be aimed at the Young Adult market, but this older adult was wowed by a great story.

Related:

My review of Solitary.

Travis Thrasher's web site.

Renee Riva's "Heading Home"

I don’t normally read Young Adult (YA) novels. Not that I have anything against them; I just haven’t been a YA for a long time, although I remember with great fondness always being directed by any church we attended to the class for young couples. But even then we would have been too old to be classified as YAs.

But I’m interested in all things fiction, and Travis Thrasher, whose books I enjoy and have reviewed here, is currently writing a series of YA novels under contract. So when I received an email asking me if I might be interested in a review copy of Renee Riva’s Heading Home, I said yes (Federal Trade Commission – please note that I have made my disclosure here). (I’m going to be very disappointed if I find out that the FTC is not monitoring my blog to make sure I spill the beans when I get a free book to review.)

Heading Home is the third novel in a trilogy, preceded by Saving Sailor and Taking Tuscany (yes, I noticed the alliteration in all three of the titles). So I was starting at something of a disadvantage, and not quite sure what I would be reading.

In Heading Home, 18-year-old A.J. Degulio returns home to the Pacific Northwest after eight years in Italy with her family. The family remains in Italy; she’s coming back to see her dog Sailor, renew her friendship with her childhood friend Danny Morgan, and to start college, where she intends to study veterinary science. Sailor remembers her, Danny turns out to have become something of a hunk (A.J.’s words, not mine), and vet studies might have to take a back seat to A.J.’s intent to become a nun.

A nun?

How about a would-be nun who gets jealous when Danny begins dating someone else?

It’s complicated. The lives of YAs are always complicated.

Here’s what I learned from this well-written, fast-paced YA novel.

The audience is not YAs; the audience is most likely YA females.

Someone reading this book would not be embarrassed if her mother or father found her reading it. It’s clean. For whatever reason, I was reminded of reading the Hardy Boys mysteries when I was slightly younger than a YA.

It’s funny. Riva, the author of several children's books in additiont ot hese novels, writes humor well, and there are scenes (including one involving blackberries) that first provoke a smile and then a laugh. Once the family arrives from Italy, and then the extended family from all over, the story moves into an ongoing series of funny scenes.

And Heading Home is touching, including one scene between A.J. and her father that’s happened a million times in fiction but here seems fresh, tender and real.

Heading Home is not the kind of fiction I usually read, but it’s aimed right at its target audience, and the target audience’s parents (and grandparents) won’t mind reading it, either.