Last Updated on August 21, 2022

Resident Michelle Foster Chenoweth will review Waiting for the Night Song [New York: Forge, 2021] by Julie Carrick Dalton on Tuesday, August 16, 2022 at 7 PM in the Auditorium.

Cadie Kessler, an entomologist, is researching a beetle that is wreaking havoc on the forests of her New England home and causing trees to dry up and die, becoming the perfect fuel for devastating forest fires.

As Cadie prepares to present her research to her scientific peers, her estranged childhood friend texts her to come home immediately: their long-held childhood secrets are threatening to surface with severe consequences.

Told in two timelines: THAT SUMMER tells of an event that happened to two young girls in the New Hampshire woods and the ripples it caused down to the PRESENT for those involved.

Eleven-year-old Cadie is an unusual girl without many friends who loves nature and roaming the woods. THAT SUMMER, their idyllic summer, Cadie and Daniela explore the creek in a boat and pick blueberries to sell. On their excursions, the girls meet a boy they call the Summer Boy. They secretly leave books on his pier for him until something happens to end their summer and haunts them for twenty-six years..

In addition to drought and farm foreclosures, tempers are running high over the influx of undocumented immigrants. Like the dry forest, Cadie’s and Daniela’s secret, Cadie’s career and the town’s resentment are about to explode.

Waiting for the Night Song weaves together the impact of long-term social injustice, immigration, racism, and climate change.

Julie Carrick Dalton is a Boston-based journalist. Her writing has appeared in The Boston GlobeBusinessWeekThe Hollywood ReporterElectric LiteratureThe Chicago Review of Books, and other publications. She contributes to DeadDarlingsThe Writer Unboxed, and GrubStreet’s writer’s blogs. Waiting for the Night Song is her debut novel.

Ms. Dalton is the daughter of Ross and Barbara Carrick of Charlestown’s St. Charles.