Book Review: What Time of Night Is It?

[osprey_archer]

Mary Stolz’s What Time of Night Is It? is a young adult novel from 1981 without even a whiff of romance in it - a rare thing in a young adult novel of any era. It is, instead, a family story, a slice-of-life tale about the summer that Taylor’s mother abruptly abandoned her family.

Our heroine, thirteen-year-old Taylor, lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she is an avid bird-watcher and an equally avid worrier. She worries about her mother’s departure, about nuclear war, about environmental degradation and habitat loss killing all her beloved birds. She hates her new high school because its construction destroyed a lot of bird habitat, including an eagle’s nest that she had watched for years.

Unlike the village elementary school Taylor attended, this new high school is air-conditioned. I was fascinated to learn that Florida schools were only beginning to transition to air-conditioning in the early 1980s: it’s so quickly come to be seen as a necessity that it’s startling to realize there was such a lag before it was widely adopted, even in places like Florida that we now consider practically unlivable without air-conditioning.

“I hate air-conditioning,” Taylor comments crossly, and she’s quite right, of course. It’s air-conditioning as much as anything that has fueled the massive coastal construction in Florida that has destroyed so much more bird habitat in the decades since this book was published. Certain birds (eagles, peregrine falcons) are doing much better than in Taylor’s time, but overall the trends she abhors have continued unabated.

Yet for all this, the book doesn’t feel unbearably heavy. Taylor’s joy in the birds, the beaches, the natural beauty of Florida, all buoy it up. There’s a wonderful scene where she and her brothers ride out in the skiff, carrying quarters of apples to feed to the manatees. Life does go on; and dread is not incompatible with joy.

Comments

[grrlpup]

This is the 1970s environmentalism that shaped my world as a kid! when we watched all those nature specials that invariably ended with how everything we'd just seen is dying. I loved so many things about this book and the one it's a sequel to, Go and Catch a Flying Fish. (A divorce book-- I feel like that was a more defined YA subgenre in that period than it is now.) I loved how the dad is a chef, and how the kids could sleep outside in a hammock and jump in the ocean for a swim anytime, and Jem's catch-and-release aquarium and the way they could free-range by bike or small boat. I think this duology might tie with Who Wants Music on Monday? for my most-times-read Stolz.

[osprey_archer]

Divorce books were still big in the 1990s - or maybe my library just still had a number on the shelves from the 70s and 80s? Anyway, I was familiar with the genre, and didn't like it - I still have enough of this kneejerk reaction that I went "Oh no" when I realized this book started off with a disappearing parent.

But the picture of their life is so charming! Everything you list, the hammock on the dock, the ability to swim in the ocean whenever, Jem's aquarium, the boat and the bikes and the freedom of their lives - just delightful.

[kore]

Oh boy the 1970s parents-getting-divorced books! Or the 1960s Mum-runs-away-to-India-or-NYC books. I loved them.

My 1970s Northern California grade school went a bit overboard. They showed us Silent Running, or maybe a short film that totally ripped off Silent Running, and a film about baby seals getting clubbed to death (my best friend cried and got sick and had to be escorted to the restroom), and at least a couple of shattering short films about pollution with smoke, brown rivers, brown skies, and so on.

[grrlpup]

Silent Running! That's intense. I saw it as a teenager (lovingly recorded off the TV onto VHS tape), but that's mostly because my dad was a wildlife biologist.

From your description of the films about pollution, I'm speculating that maybe we both saw the one about changes over geologic time, where a guy in a canoe is paddling along (in the Great Lakes?) and suddenly is on a cliff because time shifted and the landscape has changed... and at the end he goes to dip a refreshing drink of water and it's suddenly disgusting brown foam because we've skipped forward to polluted times, i.e. now! :/

[silverusagi]

it’s so quickly come to be seen as a necessity that it’s startling to realize there was such a lag before it was widely adopted, even in places like Florida that we now consider practically unlivable without air-conditioning

Can confirm. When my mom started teaching in the late 70s, in the Midwest where summers get 100F, there was no air conditioning at the school.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, my Midwestern elementary school got air conditioning in the late 1990s. Very recent! And now a lot of newer schools have windows that don't even open, because the air conditioning is just assumed.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, it's possible to live with way less heating and air conditioning than we accept as natural right now. Acknowledging that there are some people who for health reasons can't be very temperature hardy, still, in general, letting ourselves feel something that more closely approximates the actual ambient temperature would be better for putting us in tune with the rhythm of the natural world, and it would also help reduce energy consumption.

Love the idea of feeding apples to manatees. Airuwë. That's how you say manatee in Ticuna.

[osprey_archer]

I do wonder if the fact that many people in America more or less spend their lives shuttling from climate-controlled box to climate-controlled box has made them slow to believe in or care about global warming. The weather has almost no discernible effect on their lives, so they barely notice it. (This may be changing as more climate-change-related disasters happen.)

And, of course, this creates a negative feedback loop: the hotter the temperatures outside, the more AC people use, which just makes it hotter still...

[asakiyume]

Exactly so re: feedback loop...

[genarti]

As a kid in southern Ohio in the 80s and 90s -- not Florida heat, but still, Cincinnati gets pretty darn muggy -- we never had air conditioning either. Just open windows and fans in the doorways, as far as I can remember, and that was in a pretty rich suburb!

[osprey_archer]

My elementary school in Indiana got AC in the late 90s. I remember the giant fans that we had in the hallways beforehand! On a hot day it was delightful to walk in front of them on the way to art or music class.

[kore]

I like Mary Stolz's YA books very much and read most of them as a kid. Her writing has a quality that really lifts it above the typical 70s Problem Books For Teen-Agers genre.

[osprey_archer]

Heck, I would take her Problem Books for Teenagers above the Problem Books of pretty much any era! The characters feel like real people with real problems and realistically complicated reactions to them, and even when they are really down they sometimes have days or hours or at least brief moments when they are happy, which is also very real and really brightens the reading experience.

[lokifan]

That sounds lovely in its way.

[osprey_archer]

I really enjoyed it! Apparently it's the sequel to another book, Go and Catch a Flying Fish, which I'll have to track down.