That Night is narrated by Toni Murphy, and the chapters jump back and forth in time. While I generally enjoy this sort of switch between time periods, I found a lot of the chapters dragged by, when I really just wished for the information relevant to the story. I wanted something a little more fast-paced.
I mean, when your main character and her boyfriend are found guilty of murdering the main character’s younger sister, you want to know the who, what, when, where, and why as soon as possible.
Toni is the troublemaker older sister in a hardworking family. She smokes and drinks and sneaks out to meet her handsome, rugged boyfriend, Ryan. While she was close to her sister Nicole when they were younger, Toni finds that there’s been a lot of friction between the two of them lately. When Nicole starts hanging around with Shauna, the resident mean girl who’s had a grudge against Toni for quite a while, it becomes apparent that their relationship as sisters is incredibly damaged. Nicole gets away with sneaking out and lying to her parents, but Toni always gets caught. There are a lot of bad feelings there.
As the chapters jump back and forth in time, we as readers learn that Toni and Ryan have been placed in separate prisons after being found guilty of murdering Nicole. We learn that Shauna and her mean girl friends testified at their trial and pointed fingers at Ryan and Toni. But we don’t quite know what happened “That Night” until much later in the text. That’s where I became frustrated. I found the “before” kind of tedious, where Toni detailed her relationship with Ryan and all of the trouble they got into as teens. I found the “after” in prison to be very interesting, if somewhat repetitive. I did enjoy reading about how Ryan and Toni’s relationship (or lack thereof) was tested and transformed, from an all-consuming teenage lust-fest to a time of very little contact in prison. If circumstances were different and they were not in prison, would their love have survived?
Toni was an intriguing narrator, although pretty much all the chips were stacked against her from the start. The lengths that Shauna and her friends went to to taunt and tease sort of pulled me out of the story, and I found Toni’s parents to be a little obtuse. Despite all of this, I did feel invested in these characters and their lives. Toni’s struggle to survive in prison, transforming from a scared teen to a tough young woman was interesting to read about. I must say, I was surprised by the ending, and I had not predicted it at all. That’s always a good thing.
If the pacing was a little faster, and more attention was paid to the “after,” I think I would’ve appreciated Stevens’s new novel a lot more.
Rating: 6/10
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Date Published: June 17, 2014
Received: Netgalley ARC
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