Any Other Night

Any Other Night
By
Anne Pfefffer

This young adult novel is set among 16-year-olds in Malibu a satellite community of Los Angeles noted for residents associated with the movie industry. The contrast in lifestyle with that I experienced growing up could not be more stark. These kids live in mansions with bedrooms bigger than most third-world homes that have ensuite bathrooms. They get sports cars for their sixteenth birthdays. But they also get nannies and housekeepers who raise them in the absence of their pre-occupied parents.

I grew up in a small cape cod style 2-storey with outhouse in rural Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia. We had hand-pumped running water but no telephone until I was 10. We didn't have a gym but we did get to shovel up to 5-ft of snow from our quarter-mile-long driveway in winter and split firewood in summer. If you wanted mail delivery you had to make sure the rural mail driver, a cousin, could get to your box. Travel for me was by bicycle on dirt roads and I regularly made the 1.2 mile trip, a mile of it uphill to visit my grandfather's home. One winter I got storm-stayed there by a blizzard and didn't make it home until my Father came to get me with the horse and sleigh. I bought my first car with my own money when I was thirty, a Datsun B-210.

The lifestyle these poor little rich kids take for granted involves parents who feel an equal sense of entitlement. Their offspring are showered with every possible indulgence but their parent’s time and affection. Raising their own kids is not allowed to interfere with their own pursuit of happiness. Given parents who are rarely home and often divorced and separated their offspring feel a sense of detachment and resentment. This lack of communication leaves both with hurt feelings and a sense of helplessness and ingratitude. Where did I go wrong, what didn’t I give them? Add private schools, peer pressure, teenage angst, growing up, and sex to the mix and you have the recipe for this book.

Told from the point of view of Ryan a rather self-aware 16-year-old with adoring younger identical twin sisters we see this world though his eyes. The central tragedy of his young life is the death of his best friend whose parents couldn’t be bothered to return from Cannes on the occasion of their son’s earlier nearly fatal drug overdose. When he has ‘that’ talk with his father the concern is not about the fact that he’s sexually active but that he’s playing safe. When the inevitable confrontation comes it is the child that raises the parents though to his credit the father makes time to listen. Once more the author doesn’t seem to know how to bring her book to a conclusion leaving us with a typical happily after impression of things to come.