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Title: That Night by Alice McDermott ISBN: 0-385-33330-7 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 12 January, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: So Good, I Read it Once a Year
Comment: This book is fantastic; definitely McDermott's best. Readers who compare it with the movie aren't really being fair, because the movie changes the end of the story completely, though I have to admit that if I hadn't seen the movie, I would never have read the book.
First of all, as an English major and fellow writer, I have to say that the writing here is fantastic! McDermott is poetic, eloquent, and has an uncanny knack for creating believable characters in a time and place that felt all too real. Although I was not alive during the 1960s, McDermott fully realizes not just the protagonists of That Night but all the less central characters as well. Many stories are told in this novel, and in the end the collective storytelling method comments not just on two ill-fated teenage lovers, but on a time, a place, and an entire era that has since passed.
My advice is this: read the book AND watch the movie. Both realize McDermott's vision in totally different ways, though the book feels more true-to-life concerning the nature of first love.
Rating: 5
Summary: McDermott makes magic of the moon!
Comment: If there is a synonym for splendid, it is THAT NIGHT. Reading this superior novel is like taking a journey down the suburban sidewalks of youth, cracked and weathered, but familiar. It is a journey through the high school yearbooks of everyone you have ever loved, their photos smiling out at you in that moment right before the shutter clicks and adulthood begins. McDermotts story is one of first love, between teenagers, told with such an urgency that any "adult" love we may stumble upon later in life pales in comparison. The author writes with a keen eye for detail and a highly tuned ear for the sounds of growing up, and growing away from those we have loved. When this book breaks your heart, and it will, it does so without the sentimental trappings of so many love stories. If you don't love this book--I'll take it off your hands.
Rating: 5
Summary: Too spare, complex for film, beautiful in prose
Comment: Several reviewers have expressed disappointment in That Night because it only vaguely resembles the film of the same title. Indeed, the novel and film are very different--the filmmakers seemed to have used the novel as a departing point, not an outline. But the book clearly deserves to be judged on its own merits; it is unfair, even irrelevant, to discuss the book in terms of its film counterpart.
That said, this is a beautifully wrought novel that explores a subject that has been mined endlessly by artists--the doomed teenaged romance. But the beauty and confidence of McDermott's prose (the opening paragraph is gorgeous and evocative, setting the tone for the rest of the novel) penetrates the seemingly mundane subject to reveal the intensity, the sadness and irrevocable loss, represented by Sheryl and Rick's relationship. The novel elaborates upon a specific moment, a memory, the kind of memory that grown adults attempt to 'shake off' and laugh at later in life, but which they carry in them anyhow.
That Night encompasses themes too complex, too full of beauty and sadness, that cannot easily be translated to the medium of film, but which are done justice to by McDermott's surefooted prose.
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Title: At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott ISBN: 0385319851 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 12 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott ISBN: 0385333293 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 12 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Charming Billy by Alice McDermott ISBN: 038533334X Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 12 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott ISBN: 0374121230 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 12 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title:That Night ASIN: 6302989523 Publisher: Warner Studios Pub. Date: 13 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $14.95 |
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