As a mystery, Julia Glass’s fifth novel, And the Dark Sacred Night, fails completely. The plot ostensibly concerns the quest of Kit Noonan—fortysomething, depressed, directionless—to learn about his birth father, whom his mother has always refused to discuss, in the hope that resolving the past will help him move ahead into the future.
And yet Glass persists on carrying us along on Kit’s quest, starting with a visit to his stepfather in Vermont, now divorced from Kit’s mother, Daphne, whom he had once promised he would never reveal the name of Kit’s father. Will he reconsider? Of course he will! How can Glass possibly keep fans of Three Junes from a reunion with Mal and Fenno, her two best fictional creations?
Glass doesn’t go in for heavy drama, aside from Lucinda and Zeke dropping the bombshell of Kit’s existence on the rest of the family at Thanksgiving dinner and a genuinely surprising death late in the novel. Instead she examines the subtle and often unpredictable effects of secrets, and the effort of keeping them.
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