Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

 genre: historical fiction

In the secluded hills of West Virginia lives a little family. Even though the War is finally over, Eliza, the mama of this family, is not ok. Twelve-year-old ConaLee shoulders the responsibility of getting Mama to an asylum where Eliza can hopefully rest and heal. The world is not yet a safe place, though, especially in this Reconstruction period, and the road ConaLee has to travel (both literally and figuratively) is filled with with dangers and lost memories.

I chose this one because it won the Pulitzer last year and I liked the cover.  I didn't really know anything about it but it caught my attention quickly.  Things felt fraught from the beginning, you can tell something OFF but you're not sure what.  Soon, it is all clear, and it's all horrible.  The pain and loss that our poor ConaLee has to face is deeply upsetting and my initial compassion for Eliza helped me stick with this story with a timeline constantly shifting back and forth and time in a way that felt pretty unmooring sometimes.  Once I felt grounded in the story with both characters and chronology, I did guess one of the major plot points but it turns out, I still really wanted to keep reading and find out how it would all play out.  There are parts of this that reminded me in a super vague way, of The Sound and the Fury - with different narrators who can only give us the story from their own way of seeing the world.  I liked that it's about a different part of the Civil War than I usually read and although I can't gush about this, I'm giving it four stars for the history I learned about asylums during the period and for the way it kept me reading.