Night Came With Many Stars by Simon Van Booy
Stories woven back and forth in time, about several generations in one family
Night Came With Many Stars ebbs and flows with people who only take or destroy, balanced by those who give or heal. Characters are defined by what they do, not by what they are. The writing is breathtaking and I’m in awe.
A Kentucky father treats his thirteen-year-old, motherless daughter like a servant, right up to the moment he loses her in a poker game. To another man. And all she takes from home is the yellow tablecloth that her mother had once loved.
“A small clearing in the forest was Carol’s favorite place. She could lie on her back beneath the blank canvas of sky. When her mother was alive, they would spread a yellow cloth, then sit and eat apples. Carol cannot remember anything her mother said, only the sound of her voice, and that she sometimes took off her shoes and unfastened her hair so that it tumbled like ribbon upon her shoulders and neck.” p.6 Night Came with Many Stars by Simon Van Booy
It’s 1933, and teenage Carol’s aching heart begins a novel filled with suffering or joy that bounces back and forth across decades. Her mother is dead and she’s no longer in school. All she does is cook and clean for her father, and all he does is drink, yell, and beat her. She gets raped by her new owner, and doesn’t understand what’s happening when she starts to feel sick.
She runs away, and stands on the road for hours, hot and thirsty, thinking that she’s going to die if someone doesn’t stop. She wants to get far away as possible. A wrinkled old Native-American retiree picks her up. Turns out, he knows who she is and he knows she’s pregnant and by whom. He was at the poker game when her father sold her.
The stories are small gems; a woman survives a botched self-induced abortion, a Black family saves a starving white boy, Carol’s grandson wins money playing poker. A beautiful novel.
I interviewed the author for the New Books Network here (he has a great accent).
