Rating: 
Summary: Melancholy and Cliche
Review: Come on, people, get over yourselves. You could find a hundred lovely writers out there, and while McDermott may be one of them, it doesn't mean there's anything particularly interesting about this book. It's filled with such melancholy and self-importance about subject matter that is really cliche at this point. Lovers torn apart, young children in the neighborhood wondering how babies are made, teen pregnancy. It's like something a junior high class might read.
McDermott might be trying to pull off something magestic here, but it just comes off as weird. Why is this first person narrator, who isn't even a main character in the story, wandering through these people's lives like a ghost, and killing them all off? That's right, when McDermott runs into a situation that's rather dull, which is often, she gives us a little aside about someone's child dying. It's manipulative and cheap writing.
Rating: 
Summary: That Night...a novel to remember
Review: Have you ever felt that instantaneous smile that stretched upon your face, that unexplainable feeling deep inside yourself that makes you glow on the outside? Have you ever been in love with someone that everything else around you seems like a blur? Well, that is a description of the strong the bond of love is between the two main characters (Sheryl and Rick) are in the novel "That Night."
The story takes place in the summer of the early 1960's; in a typical long island suburb. On a street where every house was the same, where everybody in your neighborhood knew all there was to know about your family. The novel is narrated by a young girl who is Sheryl's neighbor.
Rick and Sheryl are two young teenagers who are deeply in love with each other even though Sheryl's family struggles with her decision of dating Rick. Sheryl escapes the reality of her father's death, and turns to Rick for comfort. "She had not been spoken to so directly, had not had anyone but Rick so directly meet her eye, since her father had died" (126.) After the horrifying news of her father's death Sheryl yet to finds out that she is pregnant with Rick's child. In the 1960's it was frowned upon if you were with child, but not married. As an embarrassment to her own town she is sent to Wayside, a school for troubled girls. "She took control of her daughter's tragedy in a way she had been unable to do with her own and turned the anger she had learned, the nastiness, to what would have seemed to her to be good use. For in these matters, it was well accepted at the time, the girl must disappear and the hoodlum boy never know" (53.)
This novel explores a troublesome time that Sheryl dealt with and then learned to overcome. "If you knew everybody you loved was just going to end up disappearing, you'd probably say "Why bother, right? You'd probably even stop liking people if you knew it wasn't going to make any difference, they're just going to eventually disappear" (71.) I enjoyed this book because it really made you look at life more seriously and made you stop and realize that you have to p ay for the actions to do in life.
Rating:
Summary: That Night...a novel to remember
Review: Have you ever felt that instantaneous smile that stretched upon your face, that unexplainable feeling deep inside yourself that makes you glow on the outside? Have you ever been in love with someone that everything else around you seems like a blur? Well, that is a description of the strong the bond of love is between the two main characters (Sheryl and Rick) are in the novel "That Night."
The story takes place in the summer of the early 1960's; in a typical long island suburb. On a street where every house was the same, where everybody in your neighborhood knew all there was to know about your family. The novel is narrated by a young girl who is Sheryl's neighbor.
Rick and Sheryl are two young teenagers who are deeply in love with each other even though Sheryl's family struggles with her decision of dating Rick. Sheryl escapes the reality of her father's death, and turns to Rick for comfort. "She had not been spoken to so directly, had not had anyone but Rick so directly meet her eye, since her father had died" (126.) After the horrifying news of her father's death Sheryl yet to finds out that she is pregnant with Rick's child. In the 1960's it was frowned upon if you were with child, but not married. As an embarrassment to her own town she is sent to Wayside, a school for troubled girls. "She took control of her daughter's tragedy in a way she had been unable to do with her own and turned the anger she had learned, the nastiness, to what would have seemed to her to be good use. For in these matters, it was well accepted at the time, the girl must disappear and the hoodlum boy never know" (53.)
This novel explores a troublesome time that Sheryl dealt with and then learned to overcome. "If you knew everybody you loved was just going to end up disappearing, you'd probably say "Why bother, right? You'd probably even stop liking people if you knew it wasn't going to make any difference, they're just going to eventually disappear" (71.) I enjoyed this book because it really made you look at life more seriously and made you stop and realize that you have to p ay for the actions to do in life.
Rating:
Summary: Loved This Book!
Review: I did not find this to be the best of Alice McDermott's works, but I did enjoy it........Rick and Sheryl are high school sweet hearts. Sheryl's father died suddenly, leaving an empty place in her heart. She fills that emptiness with Rick and when she tells her mother that she might be pregnant, her mother immediately sends her from their home in a Long Island suburb to an aunt's family in Ohio....Sheryl did not even have time to let Rick know and he is going crazy trying to find her until finally, one evening he and some pals armed with chains go to Sheryl's house causing a riot......The men of the neighborhood come to the aid of Sheryl's mother and the boys get arrested and everyone gets treated for minor injuries......In the meantime, Sheryl tried to reach Rick by phone, but never was able to talk to him.......Sheryl and Rick go on to live out their lives as their destiny dictates.......This story brings us back to our own teen years and first loves.
Rating: 
Summary: nothing extraordinary
Review: i had to read this book in school. it's horrible. it's annoying. There is no point to the story. It isn't even fun to read. I would keep reading, expecting something great to happen, but nothing ever happened. i skimmed the last 25 pages--it was that boring. there are quite a few typos in it as well. everything about it is pure cliche. the first few pages are good, then it stops. it's like, mcdermott had imagination when she began writing it, then she went braindead. i would not recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: McDermott makes magic of the moon!
Review: If there is a synonym for splendid, it is THAT NIGHT. Reading this superior novel is like taking a journey down the suburban sidewalks of youth, cracked and weathered, but familiar. It is a journey through the high school yearbooks of everyone you have ever loved, their photos smiling out at you in that moment right before the shutter clicks and adulthood begins. McDermotts story is one of first love, between teenagers, told with such an urgency that any "adult" love we may stumble upon later in life pales in comparison. The author writes with a keen eye for detail and a highly tuned ear for the sounds of growing up, and growing away from those we have loved. When this book breaks your heart, and it will, it does so without the sentimental trappings of so many love stories. If you don't love this book--I'll take it off your hands.
Rating:
Summary: Do yourself a favor -- read something else.
Review: Men actually leave their yards and talk to one another. Children lie to each other about who does and who does not know how babies are made. Women spy on the house of another woman they don't much care for. And perhaps most shocking of all, Mrs. Carpenter sits in a chair that she purchased with no intention of sitting in. It sounds like suburbia to me. But in Alice McDermott's That Night, these actions are highly transgressive acts that violate the limits of the characters' previously circumscribed roles in the neighborhood. For men, that means not leaving your yard and barely saying hello to anyone. For women, the role is that of the stay-at-home gossip, fantasizing about widowhood and asking, about Sheryl's mother Ann: "What can you do for a woman like that?" What cataclysmic event incited these changes? A boyfriend wants to talk to his girlfriend. He and his friends confront her mother. Violence ensues, jarring the denizens of this neighborhood out of their own despair over the "difficult, enduring stuff of daily life," (36) and for a while, the community is transformed. Soon enough though, men go back to barely acknowledging each other, and "that night" becomes little more than a touchstone for the neighborhood gossip. This is suburbia according to McDermott: a tragedy happens in the lives of people you barely know, and at first glance it appears that the neighbors are rallying around the sufferers, when in fact, suburbanites need the pain of others to distract them from their own voids, and get a secondary benefit of always having something to talk about.
Our source of information about "that night," (a phrase invoked throughout the work to the point of heavy-handedness) the narrator, informs us "even children know you cannot separate the tale from the teller." (157) While this maxim seems self-evident when one is reading works such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, or the more recent, Middlesex, it certainly gave me pause when I read it in That Night. What are we to make of this statement, when McDermott does not let the narrator be known by us? Clues are sprinkled throughout as to what this person has been up to since "that night," but they don't add up to a character I can put my trust in, essential in a work where the narrator is the empathic vessel through which the reader witnesses all of the events of and surrounding "that night." She tells us about Sheryl's relationship with Rick; she tells us about Sheryl's experience in Ohio, and she is absent from both scenarios, as well as many others she also tells us about. This "ability" of the narrator to report on events that she did not attend led me to wonder whether or not as an adult she was imagining/inventing an entire sweeping context for a traumatic event she witnessed one evening during her childhood. Continuously, I asked myself: how would the narrator know this? I understand that sometimes the reader must accept the conventions that a novelist employs, but I felt here plausibility is under too much of a strain.
Eugenides avoids this trap in Middlesex by engaging us with a narrator we know a lot about - we know who Cal is, what he would or would not say, how he would act in a given situation - and by making him essential to the action of the story. McDermott doesn't even give her narrator a name. And yet, at the end of the book, much attention is paid to the demise of her marriage, and the selling of her parents' house. I found this to be a very curious choice on McDermott's part: why develop her character in the last chapter of the book when there was so little development before this point? Then I got to page 164, when the narrator talks to Rick, now a defeated man, who has come to look at her parents' house. She "asked him, `Do you know why she [Sheryl] moved away?' There was a coy hint of gossip in my voice...." The narrator is happy and quick to open old wounds for Rick. Whoever the little girl was that witnessed "that night," she has become one of the adults around her at the time, a person obsessed with one small event emblematic of the misery of other people. Sounds like a suburbanite to me.
Rating:
Summary: So Good, I Read it Once a Year
Review: Several reviewers have expressed disappointment in That Night because it only vaguely resembles the film of the same title. Indeed, the novel and film are very different--the filmmakers seemed to have used the novel as a departing point, not an outline. But the book clearly deserves to be judged on its own merits; it is unfair, even irrelevant, to discuss the book in terms of its film counterpart. That said, this is a beautifully wrought novel that explores a subject that has been mined endlessly by artists--the doomed teenaged romance. But the beauty and confidence of McDermott's prose (the opening paragraph is gorgeous and evocative, setting the tone for the rest of the novel) penetrates the seemingly mundane subject to reveal the intensity, the sadness and irrevocable loss, represented by Sheryl and Rick's relationship. The novel elaborates upon a specific moment, a memory, the kind of memory that grown adults attempt to 'shake off' and laugh at later in life, but which they carry in them anyhow. That Night encompasses themes too complex, too full of beauty and sadness, that cannot easily be translated to the medium of film, but which are done justice to by McDermott's surefooted prose.
Rating:
Summary: That night review
Review: The movie "That Night," was a wonderful love story between the town sweetheart and the rebel, taking place in the late 1960's. Sheryl and Rick were the ideal couple, except for the fact that Sheryl's family and town had a big problem with Rick. As told by the watching 10-year-old neighbor Alice, she follows the relationship as if it were her own. The book on the other hand should not even be touched. It had no connection to the movie's main theme of love. In the movie, the more Sheryl and Rick's love grows, the more the townsmen start to hate Rick and his bad-influence friends. When Sheryl becomes pregnant and is forced to leave Long Island and move to Ohio, Rick is heartbroken. Alice then secretly helps Rick find Sheryl and rekindle the love they once had. The book "That Night," by Alice McDermott takes on a whole other scenario, which was not significant in the movie. This makes it confusing to the reader. "That Night," in the book refers to the night Rick and his friends came looking for Sheryl and got into a huge fight with the town husbands. "That Night" in the movie refers back to the night where Sheryl and Alice snuck out of their homes and met up with Rick. The book throws the reader off, with all the flashbacks and referring to the night of the fight. You can't feel the characters in the book, or even try and relate to them. You have the usual love story with twp kids in love and a town trying to break them apart. The author shows no connection to this problem, or what actions they took to try and fix it. Instead, the narrator, Alice, referred back to the fight way too many times, and after a while, you lose interest. In the movie however, you can distinctly identify the problem, and relate to it. Rick's love for Sheryl was undying, even when she did get pregnant and had to move away. You physically saw the tight bond between them and the measures he took to find and save her. I definitely give this book two thumbs down. It was too confusing for the reader and you weren't able to personally connect to their relationship. I do not recommend it to anyone who liked the movie, or just wants to read a nice love story. I recommend the movie more than anything, which was great. It showed the unlimited measures one guy took to see his true love again and spend the rest of his life with her.
Rating:
Summary: So Good, I Read it Once a Year
Review: This book is fantastic; definitely McDermott's best. Readers who compare it with the movie aren't really being fair, because the movie changes the end of the story completely, though I have to admit that if I hadn't seen the movie, I would never have read the book.
First of all, as an English major and fellow writer, I have to say that the writing here is fantastic! McDermott is poetic, eloquent, and has an uncanny knack for creating believable characters in a time and place that felt all too real. Although I was not alive during the 1960s, McDermott fully realizes not just the protagonists of That Night but all the less central characters as well. Many stories are told in this novel, and in the end the collective storytelling method comments not just on two ill-fated teenage lovers, but on a time, a place, and an entire era that has since passed.
My advice is this: read the book AND watch the movie. Both realize McDermott's vision in totally different ways, though the book feels more true-to-life concerning the nature of first love.
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