What Night Brings Book

"Every single day of my life I went to bed asking God to make my dad disappear."

This is the opening line of the novel in which an eleven year old narrator tells us about her life with her mother and father and sister Corine and her extended family. Her relationship to the church and to her own sexuality.

When the story begins, the narrator, Marci (Marcía) Cruz, lives with her brutally abusive father, Eddie. He beats the crap out of his daughters--more terrifyingly, goes from playful to brutal on a dime and then, after beating the girls, tries to get them to admit it was their fault. Insists they hug him and tell him they love him. The abuse and its sickening aftermath is really hard to "watch". Marci's mother enables Eddie and can't seem to leave him despite the fact that he is endangering the lives of their two young daughters. Life isn't easy, but Marci is has a very strong sense of self and though she is emotionally harmed by the abuse in her family, she never seems to lose her center and her wit and imagination nourish her.

"When night comes," Marci says a few pages into the book. "That's when everything is best. Right before I go to sleep, I turn into Supergirl. Don't be surprised. It feels good to be her. When I'm supergirl I can fly over people's heads, and San Lorenzo, where I live..."

Marci is a creative, vibrant and resourceful kid in community with an extended family, so, fortunately she gets to pick and choose from a number of role models, but none of them are openly queer, so she has to search for clues to figure out what it means that she likes girls. Still, she is decisive in her way. She knows she wants her dad out of the house. She knows she likes girls--though she has no idea that that is a thing that can happen, and so she wishes to become a boy. She has beautiful and often funny conversations with god. She is trying to make sense of her world which is peopled by a lot of wonderful and fractured and complex characters including aunts and uncles and cousins, priests (one of my favorite moments is Marci's first time in a confessional talking about liking girls) friends and crushes, her tough as nails knife-toting grandma who won't take any shit from Eddie and lets Marci and Corin know they are always welcome to come stay with her if things at home get too tough.

As the story goes on, Marci is more and more keenly aware that the consequences of her own and other people's actions aren't ever simple. Things that seem like a good idea, might play out in a very complex way and sometimes destructive way. Things that seem bad and wrong (that her father has a girlfriend on the side) has the strange effect of making her father less violent, so in a weird way, she wants him to keep seeing this woman, though it doesn't seem quite right. She gradually learns to be careful not to "rock the boat" with her parents because she sees what a fragile eco-system she is living in. How easily it is to attract the wrath of her father. How her mother, no matter how angry or resolved she might seem in any given moment, will simply never leave her father. It's both sad and relieving to see the Marci become more sophisticated in her thinking around the troubles at home.

There's a lot of humor in this story and Marci's curiosity and intelligence and resilience make this book really engaging. And I thought the representation of her mom--a parent who is caught up in the very compelling cycles of an abusive relationship and cannot do what is best for her and her children--was pretty spot on.

The opening of the story drags on at times and the ending seems to come a bit too quickly and some of the drama doesn't feel authentic. But I really appreciate the book as a whole and Marci's fierce insistence on being a kind of existential detective, and on caring about people even though she's been hurt. I thought the relationship between her and her sister was pretty compelling, though sometimes Corin's character wasn't too vividly drawn.