How good the book! (How Huge The Night)

This book is on my list of top young adult book of all time, near the top if you limit it to modern works. (Most of my favorites in this genre are classics.) If you teach adolescents or teens – or if you, like me, are an adult who likes to read their books – do yourself a favor and get How Huge the Night by Heather Munn and Lydia Munn. I think words like well-written and encouraging and inspiring and thought-provoking are thrown around too often in book reviews, but this one truly is all of those things.

(Heads up, though, that this is overtly Christian, so it would be a no go for my public school teacher friends. Sorry! I still think you should read it, though.)

I love YA fiction, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that much of it is trash (Twilight, anyone?) and that the bar drops significantly lower when you add “Christian” before YA. Another strike against my expectations for this book was the time period; I’ve read plenty of mediocre fiction about WWII and the Holocaust. But, because the blurb seems compelling enough and because I was itching for a little escape fiction, I agreed to review it.

And my expectations? They were all so far off-base that I can’t even see them from here.

At one point, I expected to gripe a little in this review about the authors’ two-dimensional depictions of all the good guys as great and bad guys as terrible...and then they twisted the story in such a way that no only turned that concept of its head but also convicted me of arrogance and self-righteousness at the same time as the main character was convicted of the same. While there is certainly evil in this book, being set in WWII and including some Jewish characters dealing with the effects of Nazi hatred, the more subtle evils in every man’s (and woman’s) heart is revealed, much in the same way as Nathan’s “you are that man!” speech to King David in 2 Samuel 12:7.

Furthermore, it is rare for two women authors to capture and characterize adolescent boys in a rich and realistic way, but the Munns did just that. I do think that some aspects of one of the two parallel storyline was a little under-developed, but I don’t think I would have noticed that if the well-developed one hadn’t been so exceptional. At one point, the gospel of Christ is presented, but it is done so in a natural way that is logical to the story – starkly different from the forced, contrived passages that often show up in Christian fiction and seem hastily shoved in to add a little more religious content.

I was frustrated by one major misstep, but that was probably the fault of the publisher and not the authors. On the back of the book, it states, “Soon after [event A], [event B happens].” I’m leaving out the specifics, because it gave too much away. Plus event A happened on page 21, while event B doesn’t happen until page 222. In any book – particularly one that is 304 pages – you can’t say “soon after” if the lapse between the events is 201 pages!

All in all, this is a coming of age story for a young Christian boy and his friends who are living in a small town in southern France before and during Hilter’s occupation of the country. And it’s a very, very, very good one. 

Many thanks to Kregel Publication for providing this for my review. They did not ask for a positive review, just an honest one.