![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: What Time of Night Is It?
Dec. 5th, 2023 09:44 amMary Stolz’s What Time of Night Is It? is a young adult novel from 1981 without even a whiff of romance in it - a rare thing in a young adult novel of any era. It is, instead, a family story, a slice-of-life tale about the summer that Taylor’s mother abruptly abandoned her family.
Our heroine, thirteen-year-old Taylor, lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she is an avid bird-watcher and an equally avid worrier. She worries about her mother’s departure, about nuclear war, about environmental degradation and habitat loss killing all her beloved birds. She hates her new high school because its construction destroyed a lot of bird habitat, including an eagle’s nest that she had watched for years.
Unlike the village elementary school Taylor attended, this new high school is air-conditioned. I was fascinated to learn that Florida schools were only beginning to transition to air-conditioning in the early 1980s: it’s so quickly come to be seen as a necessity that it’s startling to realize there was such a lag before it was widely adopted, even in places like Florida that we now consider practically unlivable without air-conditioning.
“I hate air-conditioning,” Taylor comments crossly, and she’s quite right, of course. It’s air-conditioning as much as anything that has fueled the massive coastal construction in Florida that has destroyed so much more bird habitat in the decades since this book was published. Certain birds (eagles, peregrine falcons) are doing much better than in Taylor’s time, but overall the trends she abhors have continued unabated.
Yet for all this, the book doesn’t feel unbearably heavy. Taylor’s joy in the birds, the beaches, the natural beauty of Florida, all buoy it up. There’s a wonderful scene where she and her brothers ride out in the skiff, carrying quarters of apples to feed to the manatees. Life does go on; and dread is not incompatible with joy.
Our heroine, thirteen-year-old Taylor, lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she is an avid bird-watcher and an equally avid worrier. She worries about her mother’s departure, about nuclear war, about environmental degradation and habitat loss killing all her beloved birds. She hates her new high school because its construction destroyed a lot of bird habitat, including an eagle’s nest that she had watched for years.
Unlike the village elementary school Taylor attended, this new high school is air-conditioned. I was fascinated to learn that Florida schools were only beginning to transition to air-conditioning in the early 1980s: it’s so quickly come to be seen as a necessity that it’s startling to realize there was such a lag before it was widely adopted, even in places like Florida that we now consider practically unlivable without air-conditioning.
“I hate air-conditioning,” Taylor comments crossly, and she’s quite right, of course. It’s air-conditioning as much as anything that has fueled the massive coastal construction in Florida that has destroyed so much more bird habitat in the decades since this book was published. Certain birds (eagles, peregrine falcons) are doing much better than in Taylor’s time, but overall the trends she abhors have continued unabated.
Yet for all this, the book doesn’t feel unbearably heavy. Taylor’s joy in the birds, the beaches, the natural beauty of Florida, all buoy it up. There’s a wonderful scene where she and her brothers ride out in the skiff, carrying quarters of apples to feed to the manatees. Life does go on; and dread is not incompatible with joy.
