The Night Journal

If you enjoy story lines that connect the contemporary world with its history, read this book. The characters, both modern and turn of the twentieth century, will engage you and move you. The history is well integrated into the story line, and I found myself completely swept up in the lives and events that unfold in this very well told story. The author reveals so much of the pain and conflict that accompanied the growth of the American southwest and relates it to individuals as well as to politics, environment, and the study of the past through journals, letters, and archeology. A moving love story, family saga, political expose--a great read. If you like this one, you will also like A Map of Love, by Adhaf Soueif, which uses similar devices to explore these themes in the setting of Egypt.

Meg Mabry is a 37-year-old biomedical engineer devoted to her work maintaining dialysis equipment. Her love life is less than spectacular. Meg suffers migraines and has dissociated herself from life in general in an attempt to maintain some sort of control. Over-shadowing everything Meg does is her domineering maternal grandmother, Claudia Bass, known as Bassie to her fans. Bassie is a respected author and historian, a once beautiful woman still trying to paint a fresh face over her wrinkled one. Documenting her mother Hannah's life from journals has always been Bassie's raison d'etre. Nina Witte is Meg's much-married mother. Being between husbands is a chronic condition for Nina. Bassie raised Meg because Nina's alcoholism and penchant for men interfered with child rearing. Bassie is curmudgeonly, opinionated, and demanding. She resents her advanced age and failing health and focuses much of that resentment on Meg. Meg grudgingly juggles her job and Bassie's needs but stubbornly refuses to do the one thing that would please her grandmother - read Hannah Bass's journals about life in New Mexico. When Bassie is forced to travel to her birthplace in New Mexico, she asks Meg to accompany her. Meg refuses at first but finally gives in. Bassie would drive a saint to drink, but despite her pretenses to the contrary, Meg loves her. What both women discover in New Mexico alters their world in stunning ways. In New Mexico, voices from the past seem more real than those in the present. In fact, the present seems like a pale imitation of life when Meg finally starts reading Hannah Bass's journals. Hannah was a woman of sensuality and strength, a skilled chronicler of life in the Desert Southwest and Victorian era. Hannah's courtship and marriage to Elliott Bass and her friendship with Vicente Morales enthrall Meg. Elliott is intense and self-assured, a railway engineer and secretive man who loves Hannah with passion. Despite that love, and his devotion to their daughter Bassie, Elliott is gone from home for long periods of time. Hannah's journaling ends when she dies at age 31 of consumption, but Meg and Bassie discover key parts of her story remain untold. Truths lie buried in the desert southwest. Shocking mysteries are revealed. And Meg finally learns the importance of genuine love and family ties. I loved this book, every word of it. The past lives through Hannah's journals and melds itself inextricably with the present. If The Night Journal is an example of Elizabeth Crook's work, I want to read more.

I lived with Meg and Bassie and Hannah all weekend--couldn't stop reading. I loved Night Journal! Gripping, insightful, and funny too; a mystery with endless surprises, most dealing with relationships (the essence of mystery?); and history at its best, a connecting backdrop for our lives. I felt like a Harvey Girl, I breathed the Pecos air, I miss Bassie--and Jim. An edge-of-your-seat action drama set in a meticulously researched historical background, it still has me thinking.

I loved this book. The writing is beautiful and heartbreakingly moving, and the characters are unforgettable, rendered with such sympathy and poignancy that I began to feel for them as I would for cherished friends. As the story unfolds, I found myself more and more absorbed by the two worlds depicted, and stayed up all night reading to finish it. From the start, Meg's journey is completely compelling, as she begins her long-delayed search for and acceptance of her family's famous past and how it has shaped her own life. As Meg reads her great-grandmother Hannah's journals, Hannah's experiences as a Harvey girl in turn-of-the-century New Mexico unfold and provide a riveting- though sometimes painful- depiction of her life and those times. The contemporary and historical stories flow together seamlessly, as the journals provide clues to the mystery Meg uncovers when she travels to the family's old homeplace in New Mexico. The Night Journal is a love story, a family saga, a page-turner mystery, and a keen and insightful exploration of how we come to be who we are.

This novel of four generations of women is so intricately structured that they all seem to be living at one time, together, fighting, arguing, loving, digging deeply into what becomes a history shared by the living and the dead. Hannah's journals from over a hundred years ago are astounding, so full of life and curiosity and sensual, doomed love that you think she's sitting there reading them to you herself. And that there hasn't been a more compelling character in literature for ages. ("I wanted nothing but to break the barriers," she writes--and does she!) Yet when her daughter, Bassie, starts to talk, and snarl, and argue, you feel she's worthy of Dickens. Bassie and Meg go at each other with a kind of vicious tenderness that only blood and family can bring to bear. And the men...the men these women love. All are strong. All are deeply flawed. And each is worthy of the passion he inspires. Hannah's yearnings in particular are so intense that she finds them "despotic in the night" (lovely phrase, never mind how apt in terms of the novel's title) and must send herself literally into exile from her desire. Meg, who lives in, and must try to emerge from, the shadow of the women she was born from ("she felt a need to be rid of the past, unwillingly captured by it"), falls in love like the cerebral, conflicted character she is, hesitantly, confusedly, compellingly. THE NIGHT JOURNAL combines the sweep of an epic with the intimacy of a love story. It has horrendous train wrecks (you want to turn your eyes away) and appalling massacres and monumental feats of engineering and intricate details of archeology and beautiful scenery in the midst of which its characters fall into forbidden, tragic love. Elizabeth Crook has attempted, and accomplished, a vastly ambitious work of fiction. You will lose yourself in this book, and in the process find a precious, unforgettable work of narrative art.