THE OTHER NIGHT

In Taylor’s debut novel, a series of dire events leads a New Yorker to reexamine her life.

Tori Rose could use a night out. The 29-year-old woman likes her job at Walker Art House, but not her churlish boss, and her estranged husband is spitefully dragging out their divorce proceedings. She heads to a club with her British best friend, Leslie, and one of Leslie’s friends. Things take a frightening turn when Tori, suddenly woozy, gets separated from the other two women; all three later realize they were drugged by strangers, and, by sheer luck, narrowly avoided the clutches of human traffickers. Tori, understandably shaken by this close call, takes a closer look at her past and present. She realizes that she’s always been a people pleaser; she lived with an abusive mother, spent too long in a bad marriage, and now puts up with her boss’ perpetual cruelty: “I can’t feel like a passenger in my own life,” she says. So she decides to take her life back—confronting those who have or continue to hurt her and accepting that she deserves better. Taylor presents a multilayered protagonist in Tori, a Black woman who endures others’ racism and sexism; it’s also revealed that she can hold her own in physical confrontations. Despite the title, the kidnapping attempt is but one of a series of absorbing subplots in which Tori faces tough obstacles. As such, many characters are unsavory, though a few are kind, including her gay “work husband” Paris and her friend Aaliyah, who offers sage advice over the phone. Taylor is a skilled writer who provides dialogue that pops as well as spirited descriptive passages, as when Tori, in a pre-dawn city, “nodded at the boys throwing stacks of newspaper from the back of a graffiti-laden truck and the group of crackheads stumbling to their den.”

A thoroughly engaging, modern-day tale of self-discovery.