What Night Brings Reading Guide

WHAT NIGHT BRINGS captures the intricacies of life in a working-class Chicano family dominated by a volatile father and a mother whose main concern is to please her husband. Negotiating fear on a daily basis, Marci Cruz and her sister Corin use all the ingenuity they can muster to outmaneuver the hazards that crop up around them. At the same time, Marci prays to become a boy so that she can capture the attention of Raquel, the teenage beauty next door. Supported by a cast of characters that includes a sissified neighbor-boy, the town librarian, a compassionate nun, a spell-casting aunt, and a chain-smoking, bingo-playing, knife-wielding grandmother, the novel builds to a suspenseful climax that leaves Marci with the feeling that she can’t trust anyone, even--or perhaps especially--God. The outcome is uplifting: Marci defies her family and her religion and, in return, finds her identity and her freedom.

TOPICS TO CONSIDER

Identity
1. Marci prays “every single day” for Eddie to disappear and for herself to be changed into a boy. At the end of the novel, when Marci is finally happy and safe, neither of these things has happened.
a) How would Marci be different if they had?
b) Is Marci’s new happiness based on reconciling herself to her family and her femininity, or on living in spite of those things?
2. What role does shame play in Marci’s identity (and conduct)? In Delia’s? In Eddie’s?
3. Marci is being raised Catholic, but her relationship with God is more through herself than the Church. How are Marci’s spiritual beliefs affected by her family’s beliefs and expectations, and how are they affected by her own sexuality? Conversely, how are her feelings about her family and sexuality affected by her spiritual beliefs?
4. Why are reading books and going to the library important to Marci?
5. How do Marci and Corin confront their fear?

Family
1. How does Marci’s extended family affect her relationship to her parents?
2. What Night Brings presents or alludes to a number of marriages and a number of extramarital sexual relationships. Which of these marriages and relationships make the people in them happy? Which make other people unhappy? Whose happiness seems most important in each case?
3. How is food a barometer for relationships in What Night Brings?
4. Why can’t Delia confront the reality of what is happening to her children?

Society
1. Which elements of Marci’s story make it uniquely Chicana?
2. How is Danny’s experience during and after the Vietnam War similar to Marci’s experience at home? To which other characters’ is it also similar?
3. How does television figure in the life and imagination of different characters?
4. How is Marci’s story affected by its taking place in the 1960s? By its small-town setting?

Narrative, Storytelling, and Translation
1. How is the ending of Marci’s story appropriate? What does it resolve, and what does it not resolve?
2. How does the final page of the novel contribute to an overall sense of what it is “about”? If it had ended fifteen pages earlier, would your conception of what Marci’s story is “about” be the same?
3. How do Marci’s vision of reality and point of view affect how truth is conveyed?
4. How is humor used in What Night Brings?
5. Trujillo typically does not translate the Spanish words in the novel. Do you think this is purposeful? If so, why do you think she chooses to do this?

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