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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
Welcome to Night Vale, a very strange and slightly unsettling book (but in that good way, you know? you know.), manages to end on an uplifting note. Welcome to Night Vale is charming in it's weirdness, and as Jackie says on page 390, Night Vale is "the best kind of weird." Though the actual plot of the book is slow-moving and a little uneventful, the randomness of the quirky little town and common references to weird occurrences listeners might know from the podcast make the whole book entertaining. A very good read for lovers of the alien and supernatural!
Edit! I enjoyed this much more as an audiobook! Cecil is a treasure <3
Edit! I enjoyed this much more as an audiobook! Cecil is a treasure <3
I initially gave it 2 stars but decided to move it up to 3 due to the unique writing style I have yet to read elsewhere. With that said though, the weirdness was just a little too much for me. I was moved by some of the relationships and even chuckled a time or 2 but found the long odd side plots/descriptions to be distracting and really just too weird for me to appreciate.
I have not listened to any of the podcasts, but I suspect they are better and a more appropriate venue for this story. I found the book to be very hard to follow. The writing style reminds me a little of Christopher Moore, but I enjoy that brand of "odd humor" a bit more.
adventurous
funny
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book did not need to be nearly as long as it was, although it was at times as relaxing to listen to as the podcast.
Something about the magic of the podcast doesn’t translate quite perfectly into a novel format, but it still shapes up to be an entertaining and occasionally funny read. Welcome to Night Vale is a novel spin-off of the legendary podcast of the same name, taking place in the same unusual town but featuring a few town residents mentioned but never described in the original podcast.
Jackie Fierro runs Night Vale’s only pawn shop, buying everything that comes her way for eleven dollars and trying not to think about the fact that she’s been nineteen for a very, very long time and her family and friends have all passed her by. Her life is interrupted by a Night Vale podcast regular: a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase leaking flies, and while he gives her a note she can’t seem to get rid of, she’s determined to forget about the whole situation and continue with her life. Our other protagonist is Diane Crayton, PTA member and mother to Josh, a teenage boy who is sometimes human and sometimes an odd rock and sometimes a bird. While navigating the trials of single motherhood, Josh’s father resurfaces, dragging out old memories and the mystery of the man in the tan jacket with him.
Jackie and Diane make for an unlikely duo that serves as the heart of the novel: Jackie is nineteen but has been nineteen for centuries, mature in her own right, while Diane can’t seem to see her as anything other than another teenager to look after. But Jackie isn’t as mature as she thinks she is, stuck at nineteen for a reason, and Diane has her own problems with motherhood she can’t seem to get a grip on. There’s a lot of great interactions between the two, almost a mother-daughter relationship, almost friends, a journey from hostility to cooperation that worked very well. Diane also figures out her connection to motherhood with her relationship with Josh, which has been fraught due to normal teenage issues, the less common but still normal problem of him wanting to know more about his absent father, and the other Night Valean problems like trying to teach your son to drive when he insists on transforming into a giant winged beast in the car. Josh and Diane have an odd relationship; although it’s obvious they feel immense love for each other, they don’t actually talk a lot and it was hard to get a grip on Josh’s character when he spends a lot of his time as nonverbal animals and objects. I wish Josh and Diane had as much interaction as Diane and Jackie, as Diane’s driving force throughout the novel is to keep Josh safe from his father and other mysterious forces and we never quite know who Josh is by himself.
This novel came as a great interest to someone who listened to the podcast back in the day and still remembered one of the greatest characters: the man in the tan jacket. This novel gives us more of his backstory, more about his actual personality beyond his appearance and the fact that he is forgotten by anyone he meets. This novel will probably be more interesting to those who have already listened to the podcast; while it’s marketed as a stand-alone with no previous knowledge necessary. While this is technically true, I imagine the average reader won’t find a lot of this plot interesting as what propelled me to keep reading was mostly to figure out the mystery behind one of the podcast’s most iconic figures. Detours into different parts of Night Vale and meeting with other known podcast characters gives us a little thrill at the shared universe, but didn’t really add much to the story. Seeing Carlos and having transcripts of Cecil’s radio broadcasts, our two main characters from the podcast, was fun but not necessary. Just extraneous bits that made the novel longer than it should’ve been.
Which leads me to my biggest problem: you probably could’ve chopped off a hundred pages from the first half of the novel and had no issues. The first hundred or so pages are general exposition, establishing character, setting, and Diane and Jackie’s problems, but the next hundred don’t have a ton of purpose. There’s fighting between Diane and Jackie even as they work towards the same goal, each suspecting the other of interfering with their own investigations for not very well explained reasons. Brief detours around the city, incorporating more of Night Vale’s more popular locations from the podcast but not ultimately adding anything to the narrative. It just felt like a slog. This was both of the authors’ first novel, so I knew going in it wasn’t going to be perfect, but after so many tightly-paced and plotted podcast episodes I wasn’t expecting such a long falter. There was little plot development here, nothing that wasn’t already previously established, and the constant squabbling between our two protagonists ensured that there wasn’t any continuation along their particular character arcs either. I stalled on this book for a long time because of those pages; it felt like I was just seeing the same fight repeated over at different locations, and even though the novel alludes to the repetition, that doesn’t fix the problem.
This novel was a cute addition to the Night Vale universe. I wish it had been more focused, but I can understand the excitement of wanting to explore the town in a different format. Diane and Jackie start out slow but turn into a dynamic duo, and the climax of the novel, although I won’t spoil it, is rife with excellent family dynamics and genuine emotional moments that you wouldn’t expect from a city with man-eating librarians and cosmic terrors. Even in Night Vale, we explore and replicate real-world issues that challenge motherhood and the trials of growing older, culminating in a lovely ending that would’ve been perfect if we could’ve gotten there a bit quicker. This novel is a must for fans of the original podcast, but not for a reader looking for a new universe to jump into.
Jackie Fierro runs Night Vale’s only pawn shop, buying everything that comes her way for eleven dollars and trying not to think about the fact that she’s been nineteen for a very, very long time and her family and friends have all passed her by. Her life is interrupted by a Night Vale podcast regular: a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase leaking flies, and while he gives her a note she can’t seem to get rid of, she’s determined to forget about the whole situation and continue with her life. Our other protagonist is Diane Crayton, PTA member and mother to Josh, a teenage boy who is sometimes human and sometimes an odd rock and sometimes a bird. While navigating the trials of single motherhood, Josh’s father resurfaces, dragging out old memories and the mystery of the man in the tan jacket with him.
Jackie and Diane make for an unlikely duo that serves as the heart of the novel: Jackie is nineteen but has been nineteen for centuries, mature in her own right, while Diane can’t seem to see her as anything other than another teenager to look after. But Jackie isn’t as mature as she thinks she is, stuck at nineteen for a reason, and Diane has her own problems with motherhood she can’t seem to get a grip on. There’s a lot of great interactions between the two, almost a mother-daughter relationship, almost friends, a journey from hostility to cooperation that worked very well. Diane also figures out her connection to motherhood with her relationship with Josh, which has been fraught due to normal teenage issues, the less common but still normal problem of him wanting to know more about his absent father, and the other Night Valean problems like trying to teach your son to drive when he insists on transforming into a giant winged beast in the car. Josh and Diane have an odd relationship; although it’s obvious they feel immense love for each other, they don’t actually talk a lot and it was hard to get a grip on Josh’s character when he spends a lot of his time as nonverbal animals and objects. I wish Josh and Diane had as much interaction as Diane and Jackie, as Diane’s driving force throughout the novel is to keep Josh safe from his father and other mysterious forces and we never quite know who Josh is by himself.
This novel came as a great interest to someone who listened to the podcast back in the day and still remembered one of the greatest characters: the man in the tan jacket. This novel gives us more of his backstory, more about his actual personality beyond his appearance and the fact that he is forgotten by anyone he meets. This novel will probably be more interesting to those who have already listened to the podcast; while it’s marketed as a stand-alone with no previous knowledge necessary. While this is technically true, I imagine the average reader won’t find a lot of this plot interesting as what propelled me to keep reading was mostly to figure out the mystery behind one of the podcast’s most iconic figures. Detours into different parts of Night Vale and meeting with other known podcast characters gives us a little thrill at the shared universe, but didn’t really add much to the story. Seeing Carlos and having transcripts of Cecil’s radio broadcasts, our two main characters from the podcast, was fun but not necessary. Just extraneous bits that made the novel longer than it should’ve been.
Which leads me to my biggest problem: you probably could’ve chopped off a hundred pages from the first half of the novel and had no issues. The first hundred or so pages are general exposition, establishing character, setting, and Diane and Jackie’s problems, but the next hundred don’t have a ton of purpose. There’s fighting between Diane and Jackie even as they work towards the same goal, each suspecting the other of interfering with their own investigations for not very well explained reasons. Brief detours around the city, incorporating more of Night Vale’s more popular locations from the podcast but not ultimately adding anything to the narrative. It just felt like a slog. This was both of the authors’ first novel, so I knew going in it wasn’t going to be perfect, but after so many tightly-paced and plotted podcast episodes I wasn’t expecting such a long falter. There was little plot development here, nothing that wasn’t already previously established, and the constant squabbling between our two protagonists ensured that there wasn’t any continuation along their particular character arcs either. I stalled on this book for a long time because of those pages; it felt like I was just seeing the same fight repeated over at different locations, and even though the novel alludes to the repetition, that doesn’t fix the problem.
This novel was a cute addition to the Night Vale universe. I wish it had been more focused, but I can understand the excitement of wanting to explore the town in a different format. Diane and Jackie start out slow but turn into a dynamic duo, and the climax of the novel, although I won’t spoil it, is rife with excellent family dynamics and genuine emotional moments that you wouldn’t expect from a city with man-eating librarians and cosmic terrors. Even in Night Vale, we explore and replicate real-world issues that challenge motherhood and the trials of growing older, culminating in a lovely ending that would’ve been perfect if we could’ve gotten there a bit quicker. This novel is a must for fans of the original podcast, but not for a reader looking for a new universe to jump into.
Delightfully weird in a way that is occasionally distracting but mostly enjoyable, it's worth a read whether you're a fan of the podcast or a Night Vale newcomer!
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I wasn't sure about this book originally, the writing is something I thought I'd like but ended up being very confusing and a bit unhelpful at first. It was a slow start and I didn't find myself super interested until the last third of the book. But then I ate several chalters at once as the action picked up and I enjoyed it much more! I enjoyed it but mostly because I don't remember the start lol