Night Objects

Alena "Lenny" Winter is fifteen the summer that everything changes. Her family moves from Miami to Port Angeles, WA, a small town northwest of Seattle. There, they take up a quiet existence, living on a houseboat and adjusting to a completely new setting. Things are stabilizing when tragedy strikes: Lenny's mother dies, and before she knows it Lenny is enrolled at Blanchard, a prestigious boarding school for the ultra-wealthy. "It had the air of a European castle that had long been retired from withstanding sieges to a life of housing soft-palmed aristocrats."

Except Lenny isn't ultra-wealthy, and she also isn't white like the vast majority of the students at Blanchard. Blanchard also isn't as posh and privileged as it appears. "There was a cutesiness to Blanchard, a fairytale aspect that poked fun at itself by leaning hard into its trappings. But it felt sharp around the edges. Like it could nick you when you least expected it." Still spiraling after her mother's death, Lenny struggles to fit in and find her place at the school, and the sharp edges under the veneer of the school become more pronounced. Slowly, however, Lenny begins to make inroads, forming her first friendships and starting to find her place. Soon after, she comes to learn of a semi-secret society at Blanchard known as the Pascalianum Club, which taps seven juniors each year to join their exclusive group and carry on its hundred-plus year traditions. It's not the sort of club that would ever choose Lenny...or is it?

Debut author Eli Raphael drops more than a few hints about what is to come, and we soon know that among Lenny's circle of friends, one will end up dead before the end of the school year. We also learn, surprisingly early in the novel, who that friend is. And so much of the remainder is spent on detailing how events led to a "body in the water".

It's a framework to tell a murder mystery, but more than that it's a story about class and privilege and the different set of rules that apply to a certain segment of society. "In the world outside Blanchard, most people would struggle to come to terms with the fact that someone they cared for had done something awful. But at Blanchard, and within the circles of the kinds of people that went to Blanchard, there seemed to be a different belief. It was one of merit. At Blanchard, things happened to people because they earned it, not because of legacy, or socioeconomic privilege or lack thereof, or because they had an Ivy League-trained academic coach who tutored them in every subject. If something happened to you, good or bad, it was because you deserved it."

Raphael creates a memorable set of characters, led by Lenny herself. While other books have more authentically captured the battle between insecurity and endless possibility that is waged during adolescence, Night Objects does a more than capable job. Lenny, reflecting back years later, says "Those were the moments that now make me miss being a teenager, when my edges were so amorphous it felt like I was bleeding into other people." What the friendships might lack in some level of authenticity and depth is mostly a product of the environment in which they exist.

The mystery in the novel isn't elite, but the surrounding components—the setting at Blanchard, Lenny's relationship with her stepdad, and the underlying racial and socioeconomic commentary—help to buoy the novel beyond its plot. The framing for the story is informed by Raphael's own life; like Lenny, she moved from Miami to Port Angeles as a teen, and while Blanchard and the Pascalianum Club are made up, the feelings of being an outsider in an elite world were directly drawn from Raphael's time attending Dartmouth as a work-study student. It's perhaps why that portion feels most authentic amidst a school full of false fronts, and it helped nudge this story just over the line into 5-star territory. Worth a read.