The First Cut Is the Deepest: A Review of Night Road

Kristin Hannah’s 2011 release explores first love, heartbreak and devastating loss, detailing how each change and shape us.

Earlier this year, after learning of my love for historical fiction, several people recommended Kristin Hannah’s books to me. I’ve since listened to two of her historical fiction books, The Nightingale, set in occupied France during World War II, and the Four Winds, set during the Great Depression. (Read our review.)

Let’s just say that while I liked parts of each of her books—and I certainly kept listening because I wanted to know what happened—I didn’t love them. But I had placed a good number of Hannah selections on my 2022 reading list and wasn’t ready to give up on the recommendation just yet. So, I downloaded Night Road on Audible and started listening.

The Premise

Released in 2011, Night Road follows three main characters: fraternal twins, Zach and Mia, and Lexi, a teen who has recently moved to town to live with an aunt she didn’t know she had after years in foster care. They’re all about to enter high school. Jude, the twins’ mom, and Aunt Eva, Lexi’s guardian, all add to the main cast of characters.

The novel follows the twins and Lexi through high school, focusing mostly on their senior year. Zach and Mia are from a wealthy family, while Lexi is poor. Yet Mia and Lexi are best friends and Zach and Lexi fall in love.

Senior year is full of changes and challenges and big decisions, all of which are highlighted in the story. But Lexi, Zach and Mia’s choices lead to a terrible accident with deadly consequences that change, well, everything for everyone involved. The book is divided into Part 1 and Part 2, just as the characters’ lives are divided into a Before and After. Part 2 details the aftermath of the teens’ decisions on a fateful night at the end of their senior year, and fast forwards to the future.

Things I Liked

• Grief is a huge plot point in Night Road, and, as we all know, everyone handles grief differently. The book highlights this in stark detail.

• I am a fraternal twin, so anytime a book or movie highlights boy-girl twin relationships, I’m intrigued.

• Hannah is a very descriptive writer, so I was able to picture Zach and Mia’s home, the garden their mother Jude loves as well as Lexi and Eva’s simple but tidy mobile home.

• Hannah makes sure that we know that relationships and motivations are complicated, which is as true in novels as it is in life.

Things that Annoyed Me

• The characterization of Mia: Mia is Zach’s twin sister. Zach is outgoing and handsome, confident and beloved; Mia is continually described by herself and her mother as “weak.” Her apparent weakness is that she’s shy and quirky. As the female half of a set of boy-girl twins, this may have hit a nerve. Growing up, my brother was the outgoing one, and I was the quiet, painfully shy one, so I readily admit I’m prone to bias here. But shyness and being different shouldn’t be characterized as weakness, which leads to the next issue. . .

• Mia’s need for Zach to save her: A huge plot point in the first part of the book is Jude’s insistence that Zach and Mia have to go to the same college because Mia is too weak and too shy to make it at USC on her own. Admitting my own bias, this also strikes close to home. As a high schooler, I dreamed of me and my brother going to the same college, but when the time came, we chose different universities. And, as the shy one, it was maybe one of the most important periods of my life for self-growth and figuring out who I was. So I chafe at this notion that Zach had to take care of Mia because she couldn’t exist in the world without him.

• Jude’s grief: As I said previously, we all handle grief differently. In the novel, Jude, the twin’s mother, turns inward and allows her grief to overwhelm every part of her life in a way that pushes aside her child and her husband and really anyone who cares for her. It’s an ugly, self-centered grief that destroys—and it’s likely a very true characterization of grief for those who don’t have the hope of Christ. But to me, it shone with an ugly, self-centeredness or narcissism I found very off-putting. While Jude is redeemed at least somewhat by the end, most of the second half of the book was really hard to get through because of her reactions.

Parts of this book are very beautiful, and Hannah explores deep issues such as love, grief, heartbreak, loss and even the difficulty of being a parent throughout the novel. It’s worth the read (or the listen) to help you explore the depth of human emotions and see things from a different point of view.

The Bookery Rating: 📙📙📙 (out of 5)

Drug use, drinking and sex are mentioned, but not dwelt on with great detail.

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