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| View Larger Image | The Night Journal
by Elizabeth Crook
| | List Price: | $24.95 | | Price: | $16.47 | | You Save: | $8.48 (34%) |  | | Available: | In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. | | | | | Sales Rank: | 469918 | | Studio: | Viking Adult | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 464 | | Publication Date: | February 02, 2006 | | Publisher: | Viking Adult |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
A brilliantly imagined, lavish, and transporting novel of a young woman’s search for the truth about her family’s mythic past
Meg Mabry has spent her life with her back turned to her legendary family legacy. In the 1890s her great-grandmother Hannah Bass composed starkly revealing diaries of her life on the southwestern frontier, first as a Harvey Girl at the glamorous Montezuma Resort in New Mexico and later as the wife of brilliant, and often-absent, railway engineer Eliott Bass. A generation later, Hannah’s daughter, Claudia Bass, renowned historian known to all as Bassie, staked her academic career and reputation on these vibrant accounts, editing and publishing them to great acclaim. Thanks to the journals and to the industry Bassie created around them, Hannah would forever be one of the most romantic and famous figures of southwestern history. Meg, however—Bassie’s granddaughter—finds the family lore oppressive. When an excavation on the old Bass family property beckons a now-elderly and viper-tongued Bassie back to the fabled land of her childhood, Meg only grudgingly consents to accompany her. Determined not to live under the shadow of her ancestry, Meg has never even read the journals. But when an unexpected discovery casts doubt on the history recorded in their pages and harbored in Bassie’s memories, Meg finally succumbs to the allure of her great grandmother’s story and ventures even deeper into Hannah’s life to unlock the mystery at the journal’s core. Reminiscent of Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and the novels of Anita Shreve, The Night Journal is an enthralling tale in which Indian ruins, majestic desert hotels, and the hardship and boldness of frontier life fit seamlessly with a modern-day story of coming to terms with loss, family secrets, and shattering truths that lie shrouded in memory. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 23 reviews)
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Mixed feelings on this one 
An older woman, Claudia Bass, has made her mother's journals famous by publishing them - Dr. Bass is a noted historian and scholar. And she is mean as a snake...Her granddaughter, Meg Mabry, and she are at odds mostly, maybe they are too alike and don't acknowledge that in each other - Meg has refused to read the famous journals. Maybe to irritate her grandmother, maybe not wanting to know more....
When people in New Mexico start digging to construct an addition to their building, Bassie, as Claudia is known by all, has a fit - that the hill they will unearth has the bones of her parents' dogs and she refuses to allow that to happen. She decides to go to New Mexico and fight them. In the end, Meg accompanies her.
So starts a journey of discovery. Childhood memories - innocent and trusting - but do they hold the truth?
The Night Journals - fact or whitewashed versions of reality?
The love of Hannah Bass (Bassie's mother), her husband Elliot, and their friendship with Vincente Morales interact with actual history - bringing in Mexican-American tensions, Indian relations, and even Teddy Roosevelt!
All intermix with the present and sometimes the past is better off as is, because what you remember and what is reality, may be radically different and would you be prepared to learn truths about adored relatives?
Lives parallel - Meg and Jim, Hannah, and her men...
An interesting novel - moving...slow at the start, but it builds up to and interesting read.
When I was a child, I was so struck by 2 books about journals I wrote in journals for years - AnneMarie Selenko's Desiree and Bram Stoker's Dracula - talk about polar opposites! But the strength of their words, got me to write my heart's feelings on paper, journal after journal.
Will The Night Journal influence some little girl to do the same?
A good read.
December 02, 2007 | |
History trumps romance 
There are at least two stories here. One is that of Hannah Troy Bass, who came to New Mexico in the 1890s and left a series of journals which, as edited by her daughter Claudia ("Bassie"), became famous as an authentic record of frontier life. The other is the present-day tale of the now-elderly Bassie returning to New Mexico with her thirty-something granddaughter Meg to supervise some archaeological excavations around her mother's old home. For a long time, the older story is more interesting than the modern one; Hannah's voice speaks from the page with an immediacy that makes Meg pale by comparison. It is clear that a lot of research has gone into this, and the reader is caught up in historical events as in the trivia of daily life.
About halfway through the book, there is a gear change and the modern story takes center stage. But the transition is poorly handled, many of the revelations are predictable, and the genre shifts uncomfortably between historical novel, romance, mystery story, and -- perhaps most interesting -- a study of the bonds and tensions within families. These may be too many balls for the author to juggle. I found myself getting interested in Meg and her feelings only to end in frustration, and the final sections of Hannah's journal make for very unpleasant reading that no amount of plot resolution can make palatable.
One can understand the recent popularity of books that confront present-day characters with records from a past age.* The device expands the scope and implications of the novel, allowing the author to write about people whose lives have something in common with those of the readers, without reducing the whole action to a humdrum level. It also addresses one of the prime functions of the modern novel, which is to make sense of the present existence in relation to the past. But it is also a difficult structure to bring off, without making one narrative seem constructed merely as a prop for the other one, or allowing the more vivid of the two to eclipse the paler. The danger can be reduced by strong characters and meticulous research, but good history always trumps merely competent fiction.
*Some examples, almost at random: John Darnton's THE DARWIN CONSPIRACY, Umberto Eco's THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA, Janathan Safran Foer's EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, Dara Horn's THE WORLD TO COME, Nicole Krauss' THE HISTORY OF LOVE, and Jennifer Vanderbes's EASTER ISLAND (probably the closest parallel to THE NIGHT JOURNAL).
July 27, 2007 | |
I must have missed something 
This novel reads like a second rate mass market dimestore romance. The journal references are unbelievably contrived, and the thin plot is padded with uneccessary and uninteresting copy. Where was the editor? I am an avid reader, but cannot imagine how this novel can appeal to anyone who enjoys reading well-crafted, provocative material. Although I am on page 292, I will probably abandon this book in favor of Cormac McCarthy's new book "The Road", that I purchased the same day. I am angry with myself for wasting as much time on it as I have already.
July 25, 2007 | |
rich characters, a lush landscape, an intriguing mystery and a possible romance...
In the recent film Notes on a Scandal, one of the characters remarks that "we are bound by the secrets that we keep." That sentiment is tailor-made for the women of Elizabeth Crook's THE NIGHT JOURNAL. Each generation of the Bass family has their secrets and passes them on to the next generation. Claudia "Bassie" Bass, headstrong writer and historian, is the daughter of Hannah Bass, known for her seminal journals of a young woman's life in the Southwest that have become classics worldwide. Since Hannah died when Bassie was a child, these journals were the only way she came to know her mother.
Meg Mabry, Bassie's 37-year-old granddaughter, has always cringed under the spotlight of her family's famous heritage and has never read the journals themselves: "Bassie had built her life around them [the journals], and founded her career on them as a professor of southwestern history, transforming them into these six published volumes that had become, through the years, a kind of cult literature for lovers of the American West and the Victorian era. Bassie worshiped her mother and the journals. But for Meg they were a source of embarrassment, documenting the story of an ancestor whose life had been more dramatic and interesting than Meg could ever hope hers would be."
When Bassie learns of a new addition being built on the land of her mother's home in New Mexico, which has now become a museum, she insists that the family dogs are buried there and they must be exhumed and moved before the building can begin. Bassie is determined to travel to the family homestead to oversee the operation, and Meg reluctantly decides to accompany her. Upon their arrival in New Mexico, they meet up with Jim Layton, an archeologist who runs the museum and is in charge of the exhumation of the bones. Jim has known Bassie for years and knows just how to finesse her prickly personality; he soon finds that he has a great deal in common with the more reticent Meg.
Perhaps it's because she finds herself surrounded by her family's history that Meg relents and begins reading Hannah's journals. Meg learns of her great-grandmother's journey from Chicago to the Southwest, her work as a Harvey girl, her marriage to railroad worker Elliot Bass, and the establishment of the homestead at Pecos. But when the excavation turns up human bones, everything that was known about the family is called into question.
Elizabeth Crook, author of THE RAVEN'S BRIDE and PROMISED LANDS, deftly blends historical fiction and mystery as she tells the story of four generations of women in the American Southwest. The passages from Hannah's journals illuminate the experience of a young woman in untamed country, trying to carve out a new life for herself and feeling conflicted over two important men in her life. The modern-day story of Meg, her indomitable grandmother and their "push-me, pull-you" relationship, as well as Meg's flirtation with the married but troubled Jim, is endearing and realistic. Both Meg and Jim have something to prove to Bassie and try not to buckle under her strong hand: "Some of us are living the lives she wanted us to, and some of us are living the lives we chose in defiance of her wishes. But her influence is still there." Add to this potent brew the element of mystery in the form of the unearthed body on Dog Hill, which calls all of Hannah's and Bassie's accounts into question.
With rich characters, a lush landscape, an intriguing mystery and a possible romance, THE NIGHT JOURNAL grips the reader from the start. As the story alternates from the 1800s to the modern day, it paints an accurate and entertaining picture of life as the Bass women lived it.
--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller
May 30, 2007 | |
A look into the past
The Night Journal describes the rare opportunity for a member of the current generation to look at her family's past -- their personalities, the times they lived in and most of all their secrets. I was uncertain how I would like the book at first as the main character, Meg, is not really all that likeable. She's an angry young woman, cut off from her own feelings and still rebelling against her mother and grandmother. It wasn't really all that easy to like her grandmother, Bassie, either, but as secrets were revealed through Meg's great-grandmother Hannah's journals, I came to care about them all inspite of their faults. I liked it that everything wasn't fixed and perfect at the end of the story. It has a good, satisfying ending and not the happily ever after ending that would have been so tempting to write.
May 24, 2007 | |
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