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To
outsiders, Samantha’s life is enviable. She has a handsome husband, Jim, and a
successful career as a Professor of Psychology and author. But everything is
not as it seems. Samantha’s success hides a very dark personal life.
She needs
her dear friends now more than ever. Samantha describes her friends, “they
represented her hope—for the day she would accept the challenge of her most
difficult and certainly most dangerous goal, to leave Jim forever.” Claire,
Jessica, Mollie, and Michael are all battling problems of their own. Can they
come together and mend their lives?
I commend
the author, Pam Young, for exploring the dark depths of physical and mental
abuse. There are no easy answers for the victims, and Young proves this through
the characters’ choices and corresponding consequences.
Unfortunately,
the author tried to capture too many characters’ backstories and the story lost
its rhythm. I focused on Samantha, because I wanted her to escape and
felt an early connection to her character, but she kept making one bad decision
after another. I started to care less and less with each self-defeating action
she took.
I don’t
pretend to understand how people react to severe mental and physical abuse, but
I found myself questioning a lot of these characters’ decisions. And these
supposedly lifelong friends seemed to bring out the worst in each other.
Night Sounds is an interesting take on the journey
from abuse to self-acceptance, but it lost me somewhere along the path.
Rating: 3 stars
Note: My
initial thought was 2.5 stars, but I rounded up because the author took on such
difficult material.
I received this book free of charge as part of the WoMen's Literary
Cafe Review team.
