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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #739352 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
At age 37, Meg Mabry, a single, overworked medical engineer, still hasn't found her place in the world, a predicament due in part to her rejection of her heritage. She's the great-granddaughter of Hannah Bass, a woman whose journals about frontier life in New Mexico (dating 1891 to 1902) have become famous thanks to Meg's grandmother Claudia Bass (Bassie), a historian who built her career promoting the diaries. But Meg resents the domineering Bassie (who raised her) and refuses to read the journals, acoping strategy Crook doesn't make entirely credible. Meg finally delves into Hannah's story when she reluctantly accompanies her grandmother from Austin, Tex., to Pecos, N. Mex. There, a discovery at the burial site of Hannah's dogs calls into question the veracity of Bassie's life work. Meg, meanwhile, falls for archeologist Jim Layton and embarks on a journey into her family's past that will confront her with some difficult truths about herself. Excerpts from the journals punctuate the layered but sometimes unconvincingly plotted narrative, and the historical detail depicts the uneasy late 19th-century melding of Anglo, Native American and Mexican cultures. Crook's third novel (after Promised Lands) blends mystery, chick-lit–style romance and historical fiction for a glimpse of the current and past American West. (Feb. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
". . . You'll whisper the traditional reader's self-promise of "only one more chapter" again and again,…on into the early morning hours." -- --Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, 3-12-2006

"Ms. Crook's prose is elegant, and her novel is a page-turner…. When I finished, I wished there were more." -- --Tom Pilkington, The Dallas Morning News, 2-19-06

"…full of plot twists and turns, mysteries, and unexpected developments…a book about history, land and people." -- Rita Giordano, Philadelphia Inquirer, 2-26-06

"…richly rendered… page-turning, late 20th-century mystery… with the satisfying level of clarity, imagination and historical authenticity such a story demands." -- --Gussie Fauntleroy, The Santa Fe New Mexican, 3-5-06

Bracing as desert night air. A vividly imagined and emotionally unsparing account of lives both damaged and redeemed by love. -- Geraldine Brooks, author of Year of Wonders and March

Rich and beguiling. The gradual revelation of characters' dreams and fears makes their story as moving as it is suspenseful. -- Julia Glass, author of Three Junes

Warmly drawn….A multilayered narrative of impressive historical perspicacity, enriched by the author’s loving attention to character." -- Kirkus Reviews

Review
Sumptuous, surprise-filled . . . The Night Journal is near perfect, a beautifully restrained epic with nary a wasted word. (Texas Monthly)

Crook has a clear gift for detail and dialogue. . . . [T]here’s plenty to keep you engaged and engrossed in The Night Journal. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Customer Reviews

Epic, intimate novel
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.

Fascinating read!
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.

Thoroughly absorbing fiction......
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.