Out of the Wild Night by Blue Balliett

Scholastic, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0545867566

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Blue Balliett is a gifted writer with a lyrical voice and quirky tone to her books. Typically she writes what I would describe as puzzle-box mysteries– they have many complex and seemingly unrelated pieces that have to be pulled into place at the right time by their child protagonists to solve a crime that involves a literary or artistic work of some kind. Since her first book, Chasing Vermeer,  was published, a number of other children’s books that require the characters to solve puzzles and codes have come out, but hers remained an outstanding and unique voice, although her narratives have gotten more difficult to navigate, and some books have been better than others. I picked this one up when a colleague told me she was unable to get more than 20 pages in. Surely she couldn’t be speaking of a book by Blue Balliett?

In Out of the Wild Night,  Balliett is trying something completely new– a ghost story, told by a ghost, that takes place on Nantucket, where a greedy real estate investor is buying up historic houses and gutting them to replace the original interiors with modern, updated ones, much to the consternation of some local children and, apparently, some very unhappy ghosts. Balliet’s stories often involve object conservation or historic preservation, and in this case, the absent mother of Phoebe, one of the children, is away studying historic preservation while the houses on Nantucket are being subjected to “renovation.”

My original thought was that Balliett wanted to write about Nantucket more than she wanted to write a good ghost story for children, and a well-hidden author’s note at the back bears that out. Balliett lived in Nantucket more than once, as a teenager and young adult, and it is clear that she deeply loves it and wants to share it with her readers… and for her, living in Nantucket is inextricably intertwined with ghosts.  But her choice of a a 100-year-old ghost woman unable to impact her world or even feel much as a narrator, instead of a child protagonist led to a faded story and atmosphere, and the characters seem like they are afterthoughts. It’s unlike Balliett to leave ends dangling, but while I struggled to get through a majority of the book, in which it seemed that nothing happened, after several rereads of the end chapters I’m still unsure of what actually happened to resolve events as they did. You’d have to be a very careful reader to arrive at her big reveal without being completely confused.

Despite her love of Nantucket and its ghosts, and as lyrical as her writing can be, Balliett fails to evoke the sense of place she’s working to create in her fiction that I’ve felt in books that do bring similar locations to life, such as Rass Island in Jacob Have I Loved, where the environment was intimately tied to the protagonist’s emotional intensity. In her follow-up note, Balliett’s evocation of Nantucket is much stronger than it is in the novel, and I’m left thinking that she wrote the wrong book, and would have done better to create a connected collection of ghost stories of and nonfiction sketches about Nantucket.

As much as I love Balliett’s work, especially Chasing Vermeer, she failed her readers in this book. It does not completely develop either the small world of Nantucket or the Gothic feel of a ghost story, but the pieces aren’t there to put a mystery together; the pacing is slow, the characters aren’t given the space they need to develop, the narrator is ineffective at communicating, and the plot does not hang together. As it is, the primary thing it accomplishes is to briefly bring attention to Nantucket, the importance of restoring the interiors of historic houses, and of building a sense of community. Balliett is clever and creative in her writing, but it’s frustrating to get to the payoff, and more work that the children in the target age range for this book are probably willing to do.

I hope to see another great book from Balliett soon. Sad to say, this one isn’t worth the time and work it takes to read it. Appropriate for ages 9-12, and middle school library collections.

Contains: violence, attempted murder