Night Riding

by Katherine Martin

Eleven-year-old Prin's secure world in a small Tennessee town during the 1950s is turned upside down when she discovers that her new friend and neighbor is being abused by the girl's own father. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679800646
• ISBN13: 9780679800644
• Release Date: September 1989
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Length: 197 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Age Range: 12 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 7 and higher

Customer Reviews

Disturbing subject matter handled with literary grace

Katherine Martin's Night Riding is reminisent of the work of Toni Morrison with prose that reads like poetry, concise, intense and allusively alive. Listen to this: "She stretched her mouth into a smile that didn't get to her eyes." I loved that. Immediately, the reader knows something is profoundly up with Miss Mary Faith Hammond. Her depiction of the relationship between the mother, Ada Ruth and her youngest daughter, Prin, brought me to tears. My only longing was to feel more a part of the actual night riding. I wanted to be right there with Prin, but wasn't. Perhaps the tension of the other characters caught me up in its distress. I can only say the way it is handled at the end was beautiful. I finally put the book down at 2 a.m., content and wishing for a sequel.

A realistic novel, set in 1958

Night Riding is a great book! It is set in the countryside of America, in 1958. The narrator of the story is Prin, an eleven year old girl who lives with her mother and fifteen year old sister. Her father is sick in hospital, from TB. When the Hammonds move into the house next door, Prin hears all sorts of rumours about them. That B.Z. Hammond (the father) beat up his wife, before she died, and now beats up his fifteen year old daughter, Mary Faith. When Prin gets to be friends with Mary Faith, she also finds out Mary Faith is pregnant. Determined to find out more about the Hammonds, Prin goes night riding and watches B.Z. Hammond try to molest his daughter, but what she doesn't know, is that B.Z saw her, and now Prin's in danger herself...