Mysteries of the Past Uncovered
By Sarah Williams
If you like mystery, romance or historical novels, you’ll enjoy “The Night Journal” (Penguin Group, 2006) by Elizabeth Crook ’82. Crook’s third novel has a little of all three genres wrapped in an enchanting, page-turning package.
As “The Night Journal” opens, Meg Mabry begrudgingly accompanies her grandmother, Claudia “Bassie” Bass, a renowned historian on the American southwest, to the place of her family’s roots in Pecos Pueblo, N.M., to oversee the excavation of the remains of Bassie’s childhood dogs. While Meg shudders at any mention of family history, Bassie has strong memories of her childhood years in Pecos and a reverence for her deceased mother, Hannah, that borders on obsession. In fact, she has made it her life’s work to publish and promote Hannah’s diaries of her life, chronicling her courtship and marriage to a legendary but oft absent railroad engineer and their early life in the Indian ruins of Pecos. The journals are famous nationwide, ubiquitously present in both homes and classrooms, yet despite Bassie’s constant urgings, Meg has never read the diaries. Her avoidance of them is an act of rebellion against the shadow she feels they’ve cast over her life.
When Meg and Bassie reach the burial site in Pecos, however, they find not only dog remains, but also human ones—those of Hannah’s husband and Bassie’s father, Elliot Bass. What unfolds from there is a page-turning mystery of love, loss and intrigue, peppered with historical observations of the early American southwest, that challenges the very foundation of Hannah’s journals and Bassie’s life. “The problem with the dead,” Bassie says, “is that they don’t keep secrets. Eventually they tell on themselves.” Spurred on by the mystery, Meg finally begins to read the diaries, and in discovering Hannah, she also discovers herself.
“The Night Journal” deals with the universal theme of self-acceptance, yet also highlights the importance of possessing a sense of personal accountability. Perhaps one of its most important messages is how the acts of one person can affect generations to come and, furthermore, how only by confronting your past can you truly move forward.
The characters in “The Night Journal” are as rich and complex as the N.M. landscape, and it is easy for the reader to feel present in each scene as the story effortlessly transitions from the diary entries describing the events of Hannah’s life a century earlier to the present day struggles of Meg and Bassie. Most important, “The Night Journal” is a good story that will stick with you long after you’ve finished the final page.
Crook was born in Houston and currently lives in Austin with her husband and two children. In addition to “The Night Journal,” she is author of “The Raven’s Bride” and “Promised Lands.” Her work also has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Texas Monthly and Publishers Weekly.
