Book Review: The Night Pool by Lauren Lee Smith

The Night Pool by Lauren Lee Smith had almost everything I would normally look for in a historical thriller: the California Gold Rush, a mysterious creature, gruesome murders, three women from very different backgrounds, and a story built around survival, vengeance, and the violence created by greed. The premise immediately appealed to me, particularly the idea of Clara, Mei, and Haloke becoming unlikely allies in a world that has very little regard for their safety.

Unfortunately, I could not get into the book.

Perhaps I should chalk this one up to a bad reading week—and the fact that I had already encountered one too many first-person point-of-view novels in a short period of time. First person is simply not a perspective I enjoy, and The Night Pool ran directly into that particular reading preference.

I actually enjoy multiple points of view. In theory, having three women with very different experiences and backgrounds tell their stories should have been one of the book's strengths for me. The problem was that the narration did not give me enough separation between the characters. I tend to skip chapter titles, so when the narrative voice shifts and the characters sound very similar, it can take me a moment to figure out exactly whose head I am currently occupying.

That may sound like a small issue, but for me, it becomes a significant interruption to the reading experience. Instead of being absorbed in the story, I find myself stopping to determine who is speaking. And once that happens repeatedly, the momentum is gone.

This is particularly frustrating because the underlying story is genuinely interesting. The Gold Rush setting provides plenty of opportunity for historical tension, violence, exploitation, and conflict between cultures. The three protagonists also offer an intriguing contrast: Clara, the blacksmith's daughter; Mei, a healer living among Chinese immigrants; and Haloke, whose Nisenan community has already suffered devastating losses from disease, hunger, and the encroachment of outsiders. Their eventual alliance has the potential to make for a compelling story about women surviving—and resisting—a world dominated by men.

There was also a minor historical reference that caught my attention as an error. It was not significant enough by itself to make me stop reading. Historical fiction inevitably requires a certain amount of scrutiny, and one small mistake is hardly enough to condemn an entire novel. But combined with the difficulty I was already having with the shifting first-person perspectives, an extremely stressful week at work, it became one more reason for me to set the book aside.

And that is ultimately what I did.

I stopped reading The Night Pool rather than forcing myself through it. That does not necessarily mean I will never return to it. There are books that I simply encounter at the wrong time, and I suspect this may be one of them. If I eventually reach a point where I can tolerate the first-person head jumping more easily, I will give it another attempt.

Today, however, is apparently not that day.

This is therefore less a verdict on The Night Pool than an acknowledgment that sometimes a book and a reader simply do not meet at the right moment. The premise remains appealing, the historical setting is intriguing, and the combination of supernatural horror and Gold Rush history is exactly the sort of concept that normally catches my attention.

For now, though, The Night Pool has joined the growing stack of books I may revisit someday—when my patience for first-person narration has recovered.

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