Meg, Hannah's great-granddaughter, comes into the story as the granddaughter of Claudia, and is taught everything about stoicism and pain and lost lives by Claudia. She gets involved and dragged to Pecos, New Mexico because she has always been there for Claudia, who is an old woman now and still is tied up in knots about her parents' deaths some 80 years before, when Claudia was but four years old. Hannah writes every day about her thoughts, desires, and hopes for her child and then she dies. Claudia, (Bassie, as she is known by all that fear, loathe, and love her) has to go to Pecos to dig up and preserve some old bones. Their property made into Federal property, the museum is getting a new building, thus requiring the movement of those bones. Meg goes along to help keep the peace with Bassie and the Museum building committee, and she soon finds herself learning a bit more about herself from this trip. She has to be the one to carry all the truths forward and build her own life out of the carnage.

The Night Journal is a very compelling story. It is excellently written and the storyline is such that a person who has any empathy for the characters will fit right into the lives as they are being drawn. I found myself fighting with Bassie and living what Hannah must have lived. Crying over the way Hannah died and the remnants that were left behind. This story is a life-long quest for identity: familial ties made strong by sheer will, held tight by determination against all, and dissipated by a photograph. And finally the lies and deceit that show in the finding of the bones and repression of one's self coming to an end. I wanted to tell Meg to take it easy on Bassie, and lighten up on herself so she could understand more of the lives she was tied to but couldn't fathom the reasonings. It is getting to know who the past is in ways that a person never wanted to have to face, and understanding what made the people you love do the things and be the way they are. It is a story of growth.

All I can say is, if you want to know how some people became the way they are, you should read The Night Journal. It was an absolutely wonderful book. It is about taking part in the family history you were given a gift to unlock. And getting to know those lives that went before yours ever came into being. A wonderful gift that many of us never open, mostly because we don't have the knowledge or the ability, and it is easier to forget the past, as it was the past and not so relevant to the today that we live in. However, Meg and some others (real people) that are lucky, find out that it is always relevant.

I was totally engrossed and very saddened when the story ended, because it was joy, pain, love, tears, and heartache as life really is, wrapped up in a book that started as a journal. Read The Night Journal. It is poignant, seamless, and will make you feel you are a part of the family. You will know these people.