Krughoff successfully uses second-person narration in a way that makes the story come alive, without distancing the reader from the character, and allows her to capture a stunning amount of life in under seven pages. The first story, “This is One Way,” starts fearlessly and sets the tone for the others that follow. Good fiction is an exploration, a place where the reader can gain new understanding and insight, and Krughoff delivers that. The writing in Wake in the Night is intelligent, powerful, and surprising.

We are often as much how others define us, as we are deciding that for ourselves. Both Hood’s essay and Krughoff’s stories show us that even when we think much has changed, there are still lingering societal expectations from decades passed placed on women. In each case, the mother is attacked in court, in the media, and by other mothers because the women entrusted the care of their children to other women in order to work. The crimes are decades apart, but the response is shockingly similar. Hood’s essay, “The Hand the Rocks the Cradle,” details two accounts of nannies who murdered the children in their care. When reading Wake in the Night, I also came across a true crime essay by Ann Hood in The Normal School.

The six stories in this collection highlight the struggle to define one’s identity combined with the pressure to live up to expectations and social conventions. In Wake in the Night, we are reminded why we must push beyond easy categories and find new ways of understanding the roles we play.Laura Krughoff’s, Wake in the Night, delivers stories of women ranging in age from 10 to 100 and spread over a century of time. By employing forms that break with convention in the same spirited ways her characters do, Laura Krughoff creates a world of stunning detail that examines just what people will do when expectations stifle truth.

'Spanning the last century with narrators aged 10 to 100, these stories reveal women struggling to fit a definition of womanhood that cannot contain them. In the small towns of the Midwest, girls and women dream of finding voice and forcing the world to listen. Marriages occur in the 1930s for lack of other opportunities a young girl dances to Thriller for her friend's older brother a pastor remembers her childhood spent fantasizing that she is the prophet John the Baptist. Six stories span a century of rural American women.

'Laura Kroghoff's stories have the lyrical exuberance of a Grace Paley in their bones.' Christopher Grimes, author of The Pornographers and Public Works: Short Fiction and a Novella

Wake in the Night by Laura Krughoff