Nov 16

Nov 16 Nights When Nothing Happened

Author: Simon Han
Publisher: Riverhead
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A little girl's nighttime odysseys trigger a chain of events that menaces the fragile stability of her family.

From the outside, the Chengs seem like so-called model immigrants. Once Patty landed a tech job near Dallas, she and Liang grew secure enough to have a second child, and to send for their first from his grandparents back in China. Isn't this what they sacrificed so much for? But then little Annabel begins to sleepwalk at night, putting into motion a string of misunderstandings that not only threaten to set their community against them but force to the surface the secrets that have made them fear one another. How can a man make peace with the terrors of his past? How can a child regain trust in unconditional love? How can a family stop burying its history and forge a way through it, to a more honest intimacy?

TL;DR Review

Nights When Nothing Happened is a slow burn novel pulled taught, great for fans of short stories and striking prose.

For you if: You’re drawn to gorgeous prose and craft over plot.

Full Review

First, big thanks to Riverhead for granting me an early review of this book on NetGalley.

Nights When Nothing Happened is the kind of novel that makes me want to write, because oh, how I’d love to write like this … and yet also give up on writing forever, because I will probably never write like this. This is the kind of literary fiction I love, the kind that makes you want to highlight every sentence, and yet taking any of them out of context of their respective paragraphs and pages and chapters would destroy the magic, because it’s all so well crafted.

The book is about an immigrant family from China, the Chengs. We get POV chapters from all four of them: Jack, the 11-year-old son; Patty, the mother struggling with work-life balance; Annabel, the 5-year-old daughter; and Liang, the father struggling under the weight of life. They are making it by day after day in Plano, Texas, until one night, shards of the life they’ve built rain down around them.

This book will not be for everyone. The pacing is slow, examining and lingering. It’s about language and craft and metaphor more than it’s about plot. You know that feeling you get when you read a really good short story? That’s how I felt reading this, although it’s a whole novel (albeit a relatively short one, at 260 pages). It also sort of casts out the idea of the traditional early “inciting incident,” luring us into a dream-like state before snapping taught, exploding with a wallop to the stomach, about halfway through. Just like the sleepy, strained, pressure-cooker of suburban parenthood it describes.

I recommend this one to readers who gravitate toward the more literary, the character studies, the prose that breaks your heart with its precision.