Nightwork

Product Information

Nightwork" follows Harry Booth who at age 9 starts stealing to support his mother who is undergoing chemotherapy treatments. When his mother eventually dies, Harry still keeps stealing and breaking into homes hence the title of this book. Harry eventually meets a woman called Miranda and starts to think about a different future, but is threatened by someone who wants to use his skills. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.

We follow the life of Harry Booth, whose mother was diagnosed with cancer and became a thief to help make ends meet. After she passed away Booth continued his nightwork and never stayed in one location for too long, fearing that his enemy will catch up to him. Harry Booth started stealing at nine to keep a roof over his ailing mother’s head, slipping into luxurious, empty homes at night to find items he could trade for precious cash. When his mother finally succumbed to cancer, he left Chicago—but kept up his nightwork, developing into a master thief with a code of honor and an expertise in not attracting attention—or getting attached. The fact that the lead male commits crimes might be difficult for some readers to accept easily. But Harry Booth is not your usual down and dirty thief. I know – I know -- you’re thinking that a crime is a crime and should not go unpunished. But it’s fiction! And it’s Nora Roberts!! And the writing is marvelous!!! And the story equally so!!!! I loved every relationship he made along the way. I loved Aunt Mags and Sebestian. I love that there was so much happy inside so much sad.At the end of his prophetic journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, Dante has a vision of a book. Standing in the presence of God, he sees “bound up with love together in one volume, what through the universe in leaves is scattered”. Here is a basic taxonomy then: God is a novelist. Human beings are His characters. Prophets are the readers. Like I said, I liked Booth. I loved going along with him on his adventures. And I felt some anxiety that he would be discovered. NR made him nicely clever and resourceful.

The only part in this book that I genuinely loved was the one which had Harry's mother. That's really the only point where I empathized with Harry, which is also why I felt entirely too much and cried like a baby. An unsettling example of writer, prophet and protagonist collapsing into one character. Isao is a young nationalist militant. Obsessed with the historical account of a group of samurai who performed seppuku in the aftermath of a failed coup, Isao organises his own plot to assassinate a group of prominent capitalists. Arrested and imprisoned, Isao experiences a number of dream-visions in which he foresees his own death. In one he is killed by a venomous snake and at the same time has a realisation: “I was not meant to die like this. I was meant to die by cutting open my stomach.” At the novel’s conclusion, Isao assassinates the capitalist Kurahara and then performs seppuku. A year after the publication of Runaway Horses Mishima himself staged an ill-fated coup and followed suit. Now, my problem with too expansive stories - a huge range of time, too many events, too many places, too many people but not enough character building. Or at least not enough of it words, which is what counts here. I could guess a lot of this guy's character building was there - under the surface - because he had to repress all his feelings to get his 'nightwork' done in tne beginning, and this repression ended up being a survival technique. But having to guess something like this feels like being shortchanged.Nightwork is a book I would recommend to anyone who loves romance. It has everything that makes for a great novel. Loved it!!! My only criticisms are that her writing style is changing to ‘more telling, less showing’ (with fragmented, choppy sentences rather than paragraphs) and Harry/Booth was too perfect. He’s clearly a blend of Nora’s many memorable male characters, but he most strongly resembled Luke Callahan from her early book ‘Honest Illusions’ (another favorite of mine), while Miranda, with her doting father and red hair, was a Roxanne expy; even Sebastien was too similar to LeClerc. The side characters were an afterthought, but I enjoyed Mags (who reminded me a lot of Mavis, from the In Death series) and Dauphine (who, again, was reminiscent of the female lead, Lena, in NR’s early book ‘Midnight Bayou’). The prophet at the heart of Tressell’s masterpiece is Frank, a socialist agitator who spends most of the novel trying and failing to rouse the slumbering lions of labour. We and he can see what has gone wrong in the penury-stalked world of unfettered, early 20th-century capitalism. But his fellow characters – mainly – cannot. Owen leaves the scene at the end of the novel to seek more fertile ground for his message. It ends, however, with a remarkably eschatological epilogue: “Mankind … is at last looking upward to the light… that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism.”