Fight in the Night

An electrifying coming-of-age novel set during one endless, storm-filled Florida summer in the early aughts that follows a teenage girl—the only daughter of Haitian immigrants—as she fist fights for a way into herself.

A fifteen year old and her five rough-and-tumble older brothers are booking it away from a neighborhood brawl when news of a hurricane crackles in over the TV. They hole up at home to wait out the storm, where all she wants is for everything to stay just like this, forever. Six siblings’ hearts all beating as one. Because who else could understand what it’s like to grow up with Mummy, a betting woman too preoccupied with her lucky numbers to keep her kids out of trouble, and Okenn, a reclusive father who takes his failed dreams of America out on them with his belt. Both hold their daughter and her body to suffocating, impossible standards that keep her unsure of how to “be.”

When the storm clears, the family emerges to see theirs was the only house on the block left unscathed. Amidst the chaos of downed power lines and absentee parents, each sibling splinters off to find their own path: to hustling and hurricane parties, to first loves and heartbreak. With more storms brewing and no end of summer in sight, our narrator begins testing the limits of her independence. She spends more and more time with a new girl friend, dabbling in a spirituality and sexuality that pit her in direct opposition to Mummy’s Christianity. Ultimately, she must fight for a way into herself in a world and a family that insist on her smallness.

Written with a striking blend of vernacular and lyricism, Fight in the Night is a kinetic, visceral bildungsroman in the tradition of We the Animals, by an emerging talent with a truly original voice.