Tracy Sierra kicks off her debut novel with an immediate sense of dread: a mother standing in the darkened doorway of her son's bedroom realizes someone is inside her house. Nothing decelerates from there; to hide from the invader, the mother and her two young children quickly crawl inside a secret space behind the walls of the old New England home. Claustrophobia and terror set in as she tries to comfort her children while frightening them into necessary silence. The man whose "presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she'd tasted before but couldn't quite place" searches the house, taunting them all the while.
Sierra noticeably leaves her characters unnamed, effectively developing a narrow focus on a real-time threat that readers can inhabit with her protagonist. Nightwatching skillfully stitches the panicked present to the mother's memories and past experiences, along with everything that comes after. After fighting her way to rescue, she faces another obstacle familiar to many women: being believed. ("Actually, you're crazy. But really, you purposefully set it up. Truly, you're lying, but also, you just imagined it.... You're paranoid, hysterical, but not emotional enough. Your story is too linear, but you make no sense.") This engrossing psychological thriller places immediate physical danger in conversation with what it means to move through the world as a mother, a wife, and a woman, ultimately suggesting that "[m]aybe bravery is just enduring. Maybe bravery doesn't exist. All there is is getting through it." --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer