Nightwatching – Book Review

The Fallon Spring Reads Book Club Pick

A mother is forced to the breaking point when her life and the lives of her children are threatened by an intruder

Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs.

She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender.

In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.

Back in 2024, there was a huge raving for this book and so I decided to get this book. It took me sometime for me to finally sit down and read the book and let’s just say, it took me a while to finish this book.

The premise for the book was good. It has an interesting plot. During the blizzard, a mother realizes that there’s an intruder inside the house and she is armed with a task to protect her two children from this intruder whom she calls as “the Corner”. The whole story talks about how she managed to evade the intruder from finding her children and getting help, to save her and her children from the unknown intruder.

As I said, the premise was great. But the way the story was executed wasn’t that great however.

There were too many unnecessary backgrounds to the story–about the main character’s mother’s death, which I feel is irrelevant to the story, about her relationship with her father-in-law (who is an a-hole by the way), about her relationship with her family…these story background does not really connect to the whole premise of the story. And also the fact that there were no names for the characters also was a bit bizarre–for all we know, even the main character does not even have a name, which I am not really a fan of.

Because of that, the beginning part of the book was boring–the part where the story got interesting was actually towards the end. I am not going to put too much into the review but let’s summarize the fact that no one actually believed the main character’s claim that there was an intruder in the house.

Overall, this could have been a better book, if those irrelevant parts in the story were removed and if the author could have given names of all the characters. To many, this was a great read. But to me, it was simply OK.

However, I have to say, this author really writes well and I am looking forward to read more books from this author.

Worth 3 stars.