Waiting for the Night Song is a beautiful debut by author Julie Carrick Dalton. This story is not just about childhood friendships but also the strong relationships that people develop with the environment and the circumstances of their past. Our protagonist, Cadie, has been researching the spread of beetles in forests and how the beetles’ presence leads to more disastrous forest fires. While working on breakthrough research, she gets a phone call from her long-time friend, Daniela. Her father is being investigated for a murder in their hometown from decades ago. A body has been found and Daniela and Cadie know for the fact that Daniela’s father was not involved, and the time might have come to reveal their side of the story. Cadie journeys back to her hometown and what follows is not just related to her research but also the assumptions and rules she has been living with.
Content Notes: Depictions of gun violence, death, destruction of property and lives by forest fires, illegal immigration, racial slurs and unrest, bad experiences with the foster care system.
Themes for Thought
Waiting for the Night Song touches on many complex themes. I love how they were all interwoven together in the story. The time when Cadie and Daniela were in their early teens, life was carefree. Cadie found a boat and they used it to explore the lake over the summer, gathering berries and reading books. They meet a lonely boy named Garrett and start delivering books to him to read. His uncle took him in his care after his parents passed away. While his uncle isn’t the best guardian, Garrett does not want to go back into the foster care system and a number of decisions that take place during that summer are based around this.
On The Past
When Cadie returns to her hometown, so much of it is the same but a lot has changed. She made it her mission to help out Garrett when they were young, but she has lost contact with him, did not even think for the longest time what had happened to him. As she spends more time with him and thinks about the incident that has caused her return, she starts to see how much her childhood fears and goals have shaped who she is today. She wanted to be the saviour of the lonely summer boy. The present challenges whether she was truly able to do that and the revelations from the past play an important role in her character development in the book.
On Secrets
Illegal immigration is something that happens and at certain times in history, it was the way to escape a bad life. Daniela and her family did not move to the United States legally and any incident that exposes that truth has major consequences to the life that they have built together. Waiting for the Night Song balances the nuances of living under the fear that the truth will come out while at the same time wanting to have the courage that will set the truth free so that everyone can move forward.
No matter what kind of a secret it is, whether it is harm done to someone or something essential that is being covered up, secrets have a mental and physical toll that sometimes is realised only when the truth is out. Secrets also cloud our judgement and add preconceptions to other people’s actions. Cadie’s past and the way she interpreted certain people’s actions in the present because of it made the narrative one sided sometimes but that is to be expected when one is dealing with long held notions.
On Friendship
One of the key ideas that Waiting for the Night Song portrays is Cadie’s love for the environment. She has a connection with nature and compassion for the flora and fauna which isn’t always seen in fiction. She has a strong voice in the climate change community and her encounters with people in the book showcase the many perspectives that contribute to the general knowledge about these issues
Her friendship with Daniela, how it came to be as well as how it changed overtime was a commentary of losing touch with best friends but always being there for them when they need us the most. The summer that the two were inseparable shaped them both in multiple ways. Waiting for the Night Song shows that transition by taking the reader into the past.
Conclusion
Overall, Waiting for the Night Song was an engaging read. The cover is absolutely breathtaking, the pace is a good one, and the issues are timely, set in the backdrop of the haunting present. Decisions of the past are questioned, and new connections were made. I related to Cadie, her childhood insecurities and her career drive. The diverse characters were an asset to the story, bringing in perspectives that aren’t always part of fiction.
Waiting for the Night Song is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of January 12th 2021.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
A startling and timely debut, Julie Carrick Dalton’s Waiting for the Night Song is a moving, brilliant novel about friendships forged in childhood magic and ruptured by the high price of secrets that leave you forever changed.
Cadie Kessler has spent decades trying to cover up one truth. One moment. But deep down, didn’t she always know her secret would surface?
An urgent message from her long-estranged best friend Daniela Garcia brings Cadie, now a forestry researcher, back to her childhood home. There, Cadie and Daniela are forced to face a dark secret that ended both their idyllic childhood bond and the magical summer that takes up more space in Cadie’s memory then all her other years combined.
Now grown up, bound by long-held oaths, and faced with truths she does not wish to see, Cadie must decide what she is willing to sacrifice to protect the people and the forest she loves, as drought, foreclosures, and wildfire spark tensions between displaced migrant farm workers and locals.
Waiting for the Night Song is a love song to the natural beauty around us, a call to fight for what we believe in, and a reminder that the truth will always rise.
