The Night We Lost Him
The Night We Lost Him
By: Laura Dave
“If you are looking for answers you can’t find, you need to change the question.”
I really liked Laura Dave’s book, The Last Thing He Told Me! This book didn’t quite measure up to that one, though I think I liked this book’s ending better than The Last Thing He Told Me.
This one was marketed as an ‘epic love story wrapped in a mystery.’ The question posed in this book is similar to Dave’s first book: ‘how well can you know the people you love?’ The Last Thing He Told Me was about a husband/wife situation. The Night We Lost Him revolves around the relationship between a father and his children.
The word ‘epic’ can mean spectacular or it can refer to a long narrative centered around a ‘hero.’ This love story would more properly be categorized along the latter definition, though ‘hero’ would be quite a stretch.
The Basic Premise
Our main character is Nora, because obviously… and she is still processing the grief of losing her mother recently when her father dies as well. He fell from the edge of his cliff-side property. At least that’s the story.
When Nora’s half-brother, Sam, shows up out of the blue with theories about foul play, Nora becomes convinced that something doesn’t add up. Her father knew that property inside and out, he would never have accidentally fallen. He must have been pushed.
“Our father was going to sell his company to someone else, after a lifetime of not even considering selling it. Then, for reasons unknown, he walked it all the way back and decided to leave the company to his sons. And, eight days after that, he made two phone calls to an old lover and then fell off a cliff that he knew like the back of his hand.”
The more Nora and Sam dig into the life of their father, the more they realize they didn’t know about him.
At the core of this story is the variety of families/lives their father lived. He had married and divorced three women and had children with two of them.
“He certainly kept the compartments separate when he was alive. He certainly fought to keep all sorts of things private. What if there was a reason for that? Beyond what we know?”
“Maybe he thought that if we all left our respective corners, we would have started talking. And it would have revealed something he wasn’t ready to look at— or something that he didn’t want his children to look at. The version of himself he needed to keep private.”
In addition to the mystery surrounding their father’s death, Nora’s grief has started to drive a wedge between her and her fiance, Jack. A previous boyfriend, Elliot, who knew her dad well re-enters the picture and we are left to wonder if her and Jack can weather this or if Elliot is her new refuge.
“‘I really don’t want you to go.’”— “‘That’s not the same thing as wanting me to stay.’”
Comments
This book goes back and forth between Nora’s POV and events from decades past between her father (Liam) and a woman named Cory. This relationship between him and Cory is the ‘epic’ romance.
In college Liam is immediately infatuated with Cory but Cory keeps him at a distance because she doesn’t not consider him ready to be in the kind of committed (?) marriage she wants. So instead they are basically friends with benefits. Because that’s definitely the safer route. Over the years the relationship shifts, but Cory ends up married to another man.
Liam never stops asking Cory to be with him.
Nora and Sam discover that there may have been another woman for their father this entire time, even while he was married to each of their mothers.
This whole romance thing is just not my style. It reminds me a little bit of The Last Letter from Your Lover. We’re supposed to root for this romance? When Liam has made very real decisions to have these various families and then leave them.
Oh sure, he’s still part of their lives:
“We had our Friday nights together— and if I had a school play, or an art show, he rarely missed it. But he spent much of the rest of the time in the other families and worlds he occupied. Worlds he also needed to tend to, worlds that I knew almost nothing about.”
This book made it seem like we were supposed to be sympathetic to Liam. He was a man in love, after all, and he would do ANYTHING for his kids. Except, apparently, stick around and be their dad and a husband to their mother. I really don’t care about that kind of romance. To me, Liam was a cowardly man who chased his every desire, living selfishly in a fantasy he could never let go of at the expense of his wives and children.
You would think discovering all of this would anger Nora and Sam. And it did a little, but by the end it was like they were drawn into this ‘love story’ and just cared about their father’s happiness. Bleh. If everyone just did whatever ‘made them happy’ our world would be even more messed up than it already is.
“He would do anything that was needed to get himself there: to a completely different life.”
I could handle a long-forgotten-unrealized-love-from-the-past kind of trope, but Liam and Cory’s was very much not long-forgotten and very much realized… just dysfunctionally.
They say that love trumps loyalty, “But what a thing, what a rare and precious thing if you have both.”
What is love without loyalty?
Loyalty is defined by words like trust, devotion, true, fidelity, honesty, reliability. You’re telling me love trumps those things? There is something in love that does NOT include those things?
Pretty sure that’s not love. That’s lust. And should be frowned upon in most societies.
We’re supposed to view fidelity, honesty, devotion, and truth as ‘rare’ and ‘precious’?
When love functions with loyalty as it SHOULD… think of all the families that stay together. Think of all the daughters and sons who have a mother and father to offer them stability, reliability, and unconditional love. When forbidden love stops being the goal, the destruction is abated. What a thing.
You know, maybe it is rare. But it shouldn’t be.
(Some Spoilers)
What kept this book from being worse is part of the ending. This is going to be a little spoiler (not related to the mystery) so scroll down to the next section if you don’t want to know.
When we discover that Elliot has been back in Nora’s life I was like— Shoot. I thought we were actually going to have a book with a strong relationship that weathers hard things, but it seemed like Laura was gearing us up for Nora realizing Jack was a really good fiance and everything she needed, but she was going to choose what she ‘wanted’ instead. A man from her past who made her feel close to her father, who made her feel a certain way.
If she had ended up with Elliot this book would be just a complete, do not read. THANKFULLY, Laura had Nora realize what she’s had this whole time that she was pushing away in her own grief. Turns out two people can actually be committed to each other and one of them can actually resist temptation.
That was a saving grace to this book. It paints a stark contrast between Nora and Liam which was definitely needed in this book.
Another thing that felt like a missed plot point was the fact that as Nora and Sam were digging around, they were realizing that it was suspicious for the police not to even consider that someone pushed Liam off the cliff. They were wrapping it up as if they were hiding something or being pressured to cover this up.
In the end we discover that couldn’t have been the case. So then why were the police acting that way? It’s a red herring that then doesn’t make any sense.
(Spoilers Over)
Recommendation
This isn’t a must-read for me. If it weren’t for one saving grace, it would be a must-not read. But because of the one thing and that it wasn’t too bad reading it, I would say this fits more in the ‘maybe’ category of recommendations.
Some will probably like it, some probably won’t.
This is a ‘read at your own risk’ kind of book. And if you do read it, please don’t fall for the lie that loyalty and love are mutually exclusive things.
[Content Advisory: 18 f-words, 7 s-words, infidelity referenced but not shown]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
This book just released September 17, 2024. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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