By Amy Brady | Feb 10, 2021
Eye of a painter and eye of an environmentalist - the terms the interviewer uses to describe author's 'heartbreaking' first novel.
By Amy Brady | Wednesday, February 10, 2021
(Dalton inset photo credit: Sharona Jacobs)
Julie Carrick Dalton’s debut novel,
Waiting for the Night Song, hums with the magic of a New England childhood. She describes the landscape with the eye of a painter but with the heart of an environmentalist. That’s what makes her novel so good – and at times, heartbreaking.
It stars Cadie and Daniela, two childhood friends who reconnect as adults to face an old secret that has continued to haunt them. But when they return to their New Hampshire home, something about the place seems different: the seasons are off, the land has grown strange, and not because of anything supernatural. Climate change has altered this familiar place in ways they’re just beginning to understand. The eeriness creates an unsettling backdrop for the novel’s central mystery, which buoys the plot along at a swift and satisfying pace.