4/30/2023 0 Comments Whole night book summary![]() The kind of thing that can happen to any child, at any time. Travis rapes her, and Carol ends up pregnant, runs away. She's to work for him as a domestic - cooking and cleaning. ![]() But a bet is a bet and he gives up his only child to Travis Curt, sending 13-year-old Carol off in Travis's truck with just a small green suitcase and the doll her mother made for her back when her mother was still alive. He's saying, These tiny, monumental things.Ĭlay is a bad man - drunk, violent, a widower without an ounce of kindness left in him. Van Booy is saying, Look what can happen. Together, they bend the far courses of lives and shape generations. These two points - fixed in history, set on the page - are the moments upon which everything else hangs. In 1986, Carol's grandson Samuel gets a nail in his eye while messing around with his best friend Eddie during shop class. In 1933, Carol's daddy Clay wagers her in a game of poker and loses. if his short stories are pieces of glass, each distinct and different, 'Night' is a stained-glass window, shattered. Each its own and complete, but part of a greater whole. It is a series of vignettes - of moments lifted whole and raw from the lives of a Kentucky family, generations deep - and not pieced together but curated. But if his short stories are pieces of glass, each distinct and different, Night is a stained-glass window, shattered. A novel, yes, and maybe his best - best of all his work I've read, for sure, and better, by a long stretch, than so much I've read that wasn't written by him. His short stories read like jagged glass set in beautiful boxes. I've been a fan of Van Booy's work for a long time. Find a book that speaks a language you know and you can drown in it without even realizing. I can hear the bugs in the dark and feel the spill of light from a house at the end of a long, dirt drive. With Simon Van Booy's new novel, Night Came With Many Stars, open in front of me, I know the smell of summer afternoons and the pattern of paint spattered on a workingman's boots. Read at night, at the end of a too-long day, and characters will enter and exit the rooms of memory, trailing the scent of cigarette smoke and faded perfume. The words stop crawling on the page and become music. Sometimes, in the dark, a book will talk to you. Night Came With Many Stars, by Simon van Booy
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