Night Objects
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This suspenseful novel transports readers to the windswept coast of Washington State and a boarding school steeped in privilege and deadly secrets—a remarkable story of grief, power, and the dangerous price of belonging.
"Eli Raphael announces herself in Night Objects as a writer to watch. Her prose is vivid and immersive; her storytelling is top-notch. Part mystery, part coming-of-age tale, Night Objects will keep readers guessing all the way through, but it's the book's emotional center—a daughter in deep mourning for her late mother—that elevates this novel into something truly memorable."―Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods
It is true that I wished him dead dozens of times. Hundreds, even. But I, Lenny Winter, did not kill that boy.
Lenny Winter is fifteen years-old when she moves with her parents to an aging houseboat off the rugged coast of Washington. She imagines a quiet life spent charting constellations and chasing her dream of becoming an astronomer. Instead, a sudden tragedy shatters her world and catapults her to Blanchard, a renowned boarding school for the Pacific Northwest's elite, where wealth and tradition rule.
Blanchard is dazzling, insular—and haunted by its own legends. At its heart lurks the Pascalianum Club, a secret society known to shape the school's greatest and most notorious students, and whose influence stretches far beyond campus walls. Hungry to belong, Lenny is drawn into its orbit, even as she senses that the club feeds on the very vulnerabilities she is desperate to hide.
As privilege collides with grief and loyalty warps into obsession, Lenny’s choices will lead to an unforgettable reckoning—and a murder investigation that will test every story she tells herself about guilt, power, hope, and who she is becoming.
Sweeping, thrilling, and deeply moving, Night Objects is both a gripping mystery and a profound coming-of-age story—asking what we risk, what we become, and who we hold dear when the need to belong eclipses everything else.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman reflects on the suspicious death of her boarding school classmate in Raphael's riveting debut. In chapters titled "Before," 15-year-old Lenny Winter describes her childhood on a houseboat in Port Angeles, Wash., with her mother and stepfather. After her mother's untimely death, Lenny is accepted to the ritzy Blanchard School on scholarship, where she struggles to fit in with the offspring of the Pacific Northwest's rich and privileged. To remedy that, she befriends members of Blanchard's secretive Pascalianum Club, setting her on a course that ends with the violent death of one of the club's members—and Lenny insisting she's not responsible for it. Chapters titled "After" and set in the present feature an adult Lenny reflecting on her experiences at Blanchard, with Raphael doling out tantalizing clues about what happened all those decades ago, and why it might still be on a grown-up Lenny's mind. The core mystery helps the author maintain steady suspense, but she delivers more than thrills, probing potent themes of grief, classism, and the slippery nature of memory. Readers will be eager to see what Raphael does next.
