Author: Magdalena Ball

Publisher: Bewrite Books 

ISBN-10: 1904492967
ISBN-13: 978-1904492962 

The tale opens with seventeen year old Marianne and her grandfather Dr. Cotton playing chess and chatting as grandfathers and grandchildren will.  Without warning Grandpa topples from his chair.  Mari is sure he is teasing as Grandpa is wont to do.  This time it is different.  This time it is not Grandpa teasing, this time it is a stroke which has left Eric Cotton with no brain activity.  From that beginning we follow Lily, Marianne’s melodrama driven mother, an artist who is lost in her painting, Russell Wilkinson the second husband, and Marianne. 

 Eric Cotton, writer, philosopher, and speaker has been a mainstay of love, hope and stability for music prodigy Mari. Without him Mari feels her life is whirling without direction.  Lily’s manic behavior, depression and suspicion begin to wear on them all.  Russell leaves, Mari sets out on her own, finds a boy friend, drugs, sex, violence, loss, a job and an invigorating sense of freedom; life Mari had not anticipated spirals relentlessly onward.  Twelve Step, Lily replaces Russell and Mari’s pain continues. Lily and Mari begin a tenuous tentative try at adult relationship.   Before her life can progress toward a positive, fulfilling plane Marianne meets with a committee to decide her fate.  The outcome of the meeting is a surprise for Mari and satisfying for the reader who is left with the feeling that some good can come even from pain, loss and prior hopelessness.

On the pages of Sleep Before Evening Writer Magdalena Ball presents her debut novel and what a read it is!  The reader is caught up in the narrative immediately as we sit with Marianne and her grandfather in the tranquility of a chess game overlooking Long Island Sound.   Within a short time seventeen year old Marianne is tottering on the brink of disaster, the death of her grandfather has taken away the life line to which she has been clinging for most of her life and with it her anticipation for encouragement, understanding and adult leadership and has sent her into a miasma from which she will have trouble extricating herself.   Her fine academic work to that point as well a promising musical future are sent into a disastrous downward whirl leading to nothing worthwhile until Mari’s understandable bitterness aimed at those who were instrumental in shaping her past propels the teen on a frantic search for the reality that is herself.

The reader is provided an emotion charged peek into the awfulness of drug addiction and comes away with an understanding for how addiction CAN happen to anyone and can rocket onward even to a point of no return.  For Marianne she was able to hit bottom, find the help she needed and begin to raise herself up and out of the depths she had plunged. 

Sleep Before Evening is a riveting and fast moving coming of age story dealing both with the attractive as well as the revolting aspects of anguish suffered by many who have fragile inner strength to guide them in their search for discovering who they truly are.  Marianne at 17 is intelligent although she has learned to withdraw into herself as protection against the craziness of her family peopled with a childish, bemused pretty self centered mother, absentee father, patient but fed up step father, loss of the grandparents who had provided a steadying rock to which Mari might cling.  Writer Ball presents plausible dialogue which become at times gritty and tart, well-fleshed characters who very well may be people we all have known; smiles, pleasantries, warts, foibles and all. The horrors of dependence and torpidity of drug scenes are portrayed in stark realism. 

The work is concluded on a positive note as Mari and her mother come to an acceptable meeting of their minds and Marianne again has hope for the future.

Sleep Before Evening is a must read for the high school literature reading list, the public and high school library, the personal reading shelf as well as the counselor and therapists collection of  books to loan to the students and clients with whom they are working.  This is one of the books I will be suggesting to our school counselor.

The above review was contributed by: Molly Martin: Molly is a Teacher: CLICK TO VIEW  Molly Martin's  Reviews

 Click Here To Purchase This Book From Amazon