This guest review comes from Suzanne!

In addition to raising two valkyries and tending a growing menagerie, Suzanne reads and reviews romance and comics in Southern New Hampshire. She’s just launched a site devoted to romance comics and looks forward to sharing it with you all!

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Here’s the thing about pain in fiction: the more realistic the writing, the more it hurts to read. Tiffany Reisz is a master of realistic dialogue and her writing anchors me in place and time like few others’. So when she started The Night Mark with 100 solid pages of intense grief, suicidal thoughts, and a whopper of an existential crisis… I put the book down. If I hadn’t previously read several of her books, I wouldn’t have picked it back up. There’s a trust readers build with an author over time, and it was that trust that led me to continue. While the story was beautifully written and achingly romantic, I know it won’t be for everyone.

Faye Barlow lost the love of her life, Will Fielding, at 26. While she was pregnant with his baby. His best friend, Hagen, proposes to her immediately because “it’s what Will would have done,” and Faye and Hagen spend the next four years making each other miserable. He’s not abusive or cruel, they just… don’t love each other. Faye loses the baby at 16 weeks and they can’t be there for each other. They grieve in their own separate spaces – both of them losing the last part of Will they could cling to and the only reason they got married. Faye loses her friends, because they don’t think she should have married Hagen. Then she stops her work as a professional photographer, because Hagen is one of those wealthy men who needs to prove to his colleagues that he’s capable of providing for a wife. They try (unsuccessfully) to have a baby.

This all happens before the start of the book. When we meet Faye, she’s sleeping until noon, trying to avoid Hagen, completely isolated, and still not recovered from the loss of Will and two pregnancies. The book opens with Hagen trying to initiate sex with Faye, her excusing herself to the bathroom, and then coming back to announce that she’s gotten her period. This marks the end of their IUI attempts and Faye sees it as the right time to cut ties and start over. This is where I put the book down. Late March is when the sun returns to New England, so I was starting the novel after 4 months of seasonal depression. Reading about someone who nearly killed herself after her husband dies was maybe not the best idea. (Clearly, your mileage may vary.)

But he wasn’t here anymore.

And he didn’t love her anymore.

If the dead could love, they had a terrible way of showing it.

After a quick divorce, Faye takes a job in South Carolina, photographing some islands for a historical society’s fundraising calendar. While there, she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the Bride Island lighthouse. She does some research and discovers that the former keeper of that lighthouse, Carrick Morgan, looks JUST LIKE WILL. She goes to explore, sort of drowns, and is thrust back through time to 1921, where she takes the place of a young woman (supposedly but not actually Carrick’s daughter, Faith) who drowned there.

One of my issues with the book is that both women, Faith and Faye, are miserable enough to drown themselves and that’s how time travel happens. I also had a hard time believing that Faye fell in love with Carrick in such a short time. It’s mentioned so many times how he looks, acts, and feels like Will, so it felt to me that she was simply still in love with Will and saw Carrick as a second chance. Which, hey, reincarnation or second-chance through divine intervention or… something. Of course, Carrick doesn’t want to be a replacement for Will either, so Faith tries to convince him (and the reader) that she loves him for him and it’s a new love and not the same at all. I didn’t buy it. If he hadn’t been so much like Will, would he have been able to heal her grieving heart? Probably not.

I also didn’t appreciate how isolated Faith was and how she needed two men (Carrick and a priest named Pat) to fix her. I was waiting for that moment when she saved herself, and it didn’t come. The only other women in the story are a teenage housemaid in 1921 and her granddaughter in 2015. (Time travel, sorry.) Both women are great characters, but…

My review so far doesn’t sound very positive, so here’s where I justify giving it a C grade. Reisz’s writing is gorgeous. She clearly did her research to make the sections in the past feel genuine. I could smell the peach pie. I could hear the roaring ocean. I could see the light from the lighthouse. And, most importantly, I could feel Faith regaining her agency and hope.

She went to the lighthouse for the same reason anyone went to a lighthouse.

She went because she needed the light.

In the end, the reason I initially didn’t like the book (Holy depression, Batman!) was the reason I ended up satisfied. Faith finds herself again, finds love again, and finds the light again. Problematic elements, including an incomplete grief recovery process and a murky romantic arc, kept me from awarding it a grade above C. The Night Mark is a middling book from a great author. I’m sure it will appeal to other readers, but if you’re struggling with depression or grief, maybe give this one a pass for now.