Night Watch | Jayne Anne Phillips

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2024. That, in itself, isn't necessarily an endorsement, but the summary was intriguing enough that it made it to my list. I'm in the camp of people who think that the National Book Award (along with others) are actually better predictors of whether a book is actually good. When it came out, it was to mixed review. Most notably the reviewer for the NY Times positively panned it. It's historical fiction, set in West Virginia in the years following the Civil War. I'll just cut to the chase. It's not a bad book, but it's a little thinly drawn, plot-wise and character-development-wise.

What you'll read in the synopsis is actually the second half of the story, when the main characters are in residence at an asylum that actually existed, until 1994, run by a ground-breaking doctor, Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. It takes a while to pay off the title, and some of the characters have the potential to be more interesting than they are.

I guess the fact that I'm rambling to fill up three paragraphs means that the book is just OK.