WA author Eli Raphael's debut novel takes place in Port Angeles

There are so many opportunities to fall in love with a book. It can happen partway through, after you really get to know the characters, or it might happen at the end when you reflect on what you've read. Sometimes, if you're very lucky, it can happen on the first page.

Washington author Eli Raphael's debut novel, "Night Objects" (out May 26 from Grand Central Publishing), had me from the jump. That first page not only grabbed my attention, it commanded it. I was prey being slowly devoured by a snake, unable to move or look away through all 370-odd pages. The first page is a prologue of sorts, and the last few lines read, "It's true that I wished him dead dozens of times. Hundreds, even. But I, Lenny Winter, did not kill that boy."

What follows is a gripping, suspenseful tale told by protagonist Lenny Winter as she recounts her move as a 15-year-old from Miami to Port Angeles. The subsequent death of her mother in a tragic accident sets into motion Lenny's placement at an elite, remote boarding school called Blanchard, and throughout the story, Raphael explores the way grief, secrets, power and the struggles that envelop all three can define a person.

It's not just the intriguing plot - a dark academia murder mystery combined with a coming-of-age tale - it's the way Raphael's words chew up the scenery she sets. Upon arriving in Port Angeles after a cross-country road trip, Lenny describes the salty air of the peninsula as something that "fills your eyes and your lungs and you become puffy with the weightlessness of the air, the sky, the clouds, the spicy piney needles that litter mudroom floors and settle into dark flannel crevices in the beds of loggers and beauticians and fishermen."

I'm not usually a reader who annotates her books, but my copy of "Night Objects" drank up the ink from my highlighter as I devoured the pages of Lenny's life, the dueling timelines from before the murder and after finally crashing into each other about two-thirds through it. Future Lenny is not only telling us the story, she's telling it with the gift of hindsight, only now questioning all the choices she made along the way.

"Something I was very fascinated with in my early 20s was this idea of the ‘What if?' and the impact of the decisions you make," Raphael said during a recent phone call. "There's a lot of anxiety you can experience, what if I had just done this or that, would things have turned out differently?"

The book got its start as a short story that Raphael wrote when she was an undergraduate, putting a spin on her own personal story. She, too, moved to Port Angeles when she was a teen and had experienced much of the same culture shock Lenny does upon landing in the small town. In that first story, Port Angeles was the main character.

She had put the original story aside, but after her mother passed away when she was 23, she came back to it, weaving in her own deeply personal experiences with grief and the big, beautifully rugged landscape of coastal Washington with an elite school and murder mystery elements. And while Raphael didn't attend a boarding school or stumble across murder, the lens of her own grief and relationship to the area deeply informed how Lenny moves through the world Raphael created.

"There is something darkly magical about the peninsula in general and the way moss covers everything and the shades of light and the water and the leaves in the fall," Raphael says. "There's a magic that happens when she goes to Blanchard. This isn't a fantasy novel, but it's a different world."

And while that world is fictional, it's recognizable. The culture shock Lenny experienced in Port Angeles pales in comparison to the world of Blanchard, rife with wealthy students high on their own legacy and importance. It's a place of social clubs, hierarchies and an open-secret society called the Pascalianum Club that everyone dreams of being tapped for.

The desire to fit in, be liked and potentially be inducted as a pledge has everyone vying for power in a way that feels very familiar to anyone who survived high school and had to make uncomfortable choices when trying to fit in and be liked.

"I hope (the book) speaks to all different kinds of people, but especially people who are raised and identified as girls," Raphael says. "You're betraying yourself in order to be accepted, to gain more power in a system that's set up for you to fail and for you to struggle."

Lenny has a singular friend from her brief stay in Port Angeles, a tether of sorts to the "real world" in the angry, rough-and-tumble Sara, an "embodiment of the working class world" that Lenny isn't truly a part of. However, she's much closer to Sara in social status than her new ultrawealthy classmates with their yacht-owning daddies and supermodel mothers, something she struggles with when trying to find her own footing.

"For a lot of the book, Lenny's dodging Sara's calls, but her life at Blanchard is a mirage," Raphael says. "It's a fool's gold world that she's convincing herself she belongs to. I think Sara, probably of all the people, sees Lenny the most clearly."

At school, there's her casually cruel roommate Sloan, the untouchable cool guy Henry, the manic, enigmatic Vikram and the laid back Nico. Lenny manages to find common - albeit shaky - ground with each, but as an unreliable narrator, she helps to hide each character's true motivations until it's too late, when Raphael has us questioning what she calls "the banality of evil."

"No one really sets out to be evil; we're all just kind of doing our thing," she says. "We have that sort of very blinders-on experience, particularly when you're in high school."

And while not every character is likable, or even redeemable, it's what makes the ending payoff so sweet.

"It's always the people closest to us that hurt us the most. It wouldn't have hurt as much if Lenny hadn't been betrayed by the people closest to her," Raphael says. "She had to like them first."

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