Review: Nights When Nothing Happened

Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Cheng family moves to Plano, Texas in 2003, settling into suburbia. The father is a photographer, but has what I would call ptsd about intimacy. The mother is an engineer and works many hours with international teams. Jack, the son, spent his younger childhood in China with his grandparents and one night saves his little sister Annabel when she goes outside in the freezing cold, he thinks to sleepwalk. The story rotates between the family members where is becomes clear that all of them understand events differently, and some ideas originally presented as facts may not be. The children are underparented and this leads to a major event that disrupts the entire family, bringing their new identities into question.

This is on the long but not shortlist of the Tournament of Books. I read it from my public library on my new Kindle Oasis (a gift, not an advertisement.)

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