Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona

Harper Perennial, 2024

ISBN: 9780063330511

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Buy:  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

Midnight on Beacon Street has a fantastic first chapter, Seen through the eyes of six year old Ben, it starts just after midnight, and we immediately know something has gone terribly, violently, wrong. But there’s no clue as to what actually happened, who did it, or who it happened to. Emily Ruth Verona forces us to backtrack to the early evening arrival of Amy, the babysitter, to find out. Ben and Amy, the point-of-view characters, alternate chapters, with overlapping time frames that give us their differing views of the same events. Amy, the protagonist, suffers from anxiety, and we get some background on her own experience with a babysitter who helped her develop a way to cope with it. The back-and-forth on the timeline is a cool storytelling technique, but there’s so much jumping around that it messed with the narrative for me, as I was constantly having to flip around to figure out the linear sequence of events.

It’s 1993, and in the suburban community of Chase Hills, there have been a rash of burglaries. Amy shows up for her regular Friday night  babysitting job, watching hostile preteen Mira and her younger brother Ben while their mother is out on a date, She is expecting a relatively calm evening of games and stories until the kids go to bed, and then a cuddle with her boyfriend Miles over while they watch Halloween (horror movies are a way for her to deal with her anxiety, although Halloween is an interesting choice to take on a babysitting job).. Miles is not a fan of horror, but their debate over whether to watch it is interrupted when MIles’ obnoxious older brother Patrick, his girlfriend Sadie (Amy’s former babysitter), and Sadie’s sister Tess, who demanded a ride from Miles after their car broke down, push their way in and refuse to leave. It’s creepy, and I was so angry that Miles put her in that situation, even if it wasn’t on purpose. Amy tries to keep them away from her charges, but her anxiety makes it difficult to manage the older teens and also make sure the kids are safe. She finally draws the line, and Patrick, Sadie, and Tess leave in Miles’ car, leaving the two of them together.  Amy is so angry that she tells Miles to leave, and because the others have taken his car, she gives him her keys so he can drive her car home.

Meanwhile Mira and Ben are upstairs when the phone rings. They are never supposed to answer the phone when it rings but Ben answers and then Mira hangs the phone up, angry.

It’s apparently visiting night because a neighbor drops by next to drop off a letter, Then there’s another knock, and Amy(failing to follow basic rules for surviving a horror movie) opens the door to a strange man demanding to see his children. The single mother she’s sitting for has finally been tracked down by her abusive ex-husband, and he wants his kids right away. Amy tries to keep him out and protect Ben, and Mira and Amy together finally threaten him into leaving. It’s a lot scarier of a scene than that description makes it sound.

With Mira and Ben both safely upstairs again, Amy cleans up from the busy night only to hear a noise from the kitchen. Sadie is in the kitchen carving her initials into the baseball bat Amy threatened the kids’ father with, using a steak knife, believing Amy had left because her car is no longer there.  There have been several flashbacks in the book to the time when Sadie was Amy’s “cool big sis” babysitter. Now that Sadie is more of a peer, their past has created an unevenness to their relationship . Sadie admits she is the burglar in the news, but  it’s unclear exactly what her purpose is at this point– whether she’s there to steal something, create some other minor mischief, or do something really awful–, and we never really find out because Ben, who’s supposed to be asleep, comes into the kitchen looking for a glass of milk, and things spin out of control fast.

Verona has anxiety herself. She waited a long time to be able to write a character with anxiety realistically and with depth, and I think she succeeded with that. Amy does freeze up but she also has some agency and when it comes down to it she acts to protect herself and the kids. I also liked that she expressed her feelings to Miles and he respected her. As much of a pushover as he was for the older kids, his treatment of Amy felt almost too good to be true for an awkward teenage boy.

This does feel like a book where “things just happen”:: I can’t imagine all of these seemingly unrelated events occurring in one evening (although they do all end up contributing to the finale) and Sadie’s motives remain a mystery to me. It’s good that Amy had the opportunity to define herself and discover she could handle fear outside a movie screen, but as a parent, I wouldn’t be asking her back to watch my kids. Recommended.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski