What Happened That Night

A Novel

By: Sandra Block

Narrated by: Joel Richards, Karissa Vacker

Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

She doesn't remember that night. But she will never be the same. One moment, Dahlia is a successful Harvard student; the next, she wakes up from a party, the victim of a brutal assault. Her life veers into a tailspin, and what's worse - her memory of the attack has been ripped away, leaving a cold rage in its wake.

Now, years later, Dahlia is a tattooed paralegal suffering from PTSD and still haunted by that night. Until one day, a video surfaces online, and Dahlia sees her attack for the first time. Now she knows what happened to her. And she knows who is to blame. Her rage is no longer cold, but burning, red hot. And she is about to make everyone pay.

©2018 Sandra Block (P)2018 Tantor

My favourite so far this year!

Wow! I did not want this book to end. I loved the different perspectives and the way the story went back & forth in time. Sometimes graphic but very realistic. Narration was excellent! And who doesn't love a great story about revenge!

Decent book over all

I thought the story line was pretty good in this book. Characters were believable & interesting. narration good too, but I did get confused sometimes with the back & forth method of writing which I wish authors would use less & the tendency to write in text short language I find annoying. Otherwise not bad, Liked the ending.

Not Young Adult

First and foremost: while classified as YA, it certainly shouldn't be. The graphic details, language, and material is enough to give anyone nightmares.
Other than that it is common of modern style fiction writing. Fine, but unfortunately not one that will ever be known as a classic.

love Sandra Block

loved this book. I can say I never saw it coming! highly recommend this author.

Starts a little slow. But then takes you on a wild ride you will never forget.

Some of this was difficult to hear. Especially, the horrible things said to dahlia during "the episode". The terrible betrayal will shock you. Stay with it. All is resolved at the end.

Good story, stupid girl..

Story line was good and I liked the interaction between characters.
I found myself shaking my head at the stupidity of our main character not too smart in lots of scenes.

Not terrible.

The storyline isn't bad and it flows good but mind blowing it is not. Originality may be missing but I never once wanted to turn it off. If you like happy endings this one's for you.

Well done!

Good novel but trigger alert regarding rape. Yet it's very much worth listening to. It does not have over the top gratuitous violence, has interesting and believable characters. Not a five star because the pace was a bit slow.

Decent Idea...But Poorly Executed

This was my first book by this author, and I doubt I'll read any more from her after this. I was able to get through the book, but it wasn't due to the story itself nudging me forward. The further I got into the book was like sludging through mud to the inevitable ending I had predicted before I even got to the halfway point in the story.

First, the good. I found the idea behind the story was pretty interesting. There are all sorts of revenge type stories, but this has a bit smarter and more (seamingly) modern take on the idea. It was intriguing enough that it kept me going once the pace fell off and got sluggish. Secondly the narration was above average, just not exceptional. I found the concept of first person storytelling from different points of view to be creative and different, and the changes between different narrators didn't really bother me. The weakness in the narration was the female narrator's Boston accent for the character specified to have a heavy Boston accent was really weak. Other than that, narration was well done.

Unfortunately, now you have the bad and there's plenty of it. The author uses flashback sequences throughout the book to fill in details about the core conflict that happened 5 years prior to the telling of this story. The intermittent breaks in the storyline were fine in the beginning, but she carries these flashback chapters on for far too long in the book until they're no longer adding anything to the story and are just slowing down the pace...and creating more sludge to wade through for little payback. This results in these extra chapters taking away from the main process in the revenge story leaving very little left for the details involved in the execution of and response to the different revenge plans, so it becomes more fantasy requiring the reader to suspend belief in how the real world actually works in order to just accept things and move forward with the story. It's more like a deep idea with very naive and shallow storytelling.

My major complaint with this author was the overall shallowness of her story telling. I thought Harvard educated people with A-type competitive personalities were supposed to be intelligent people with a broad understanding of how things in the world work, but you couldn't prove that by the characters she created in this book. She totally missed the opportunity to have very smart and inventive protagonists and antagonists squaring off with each other in surprising and creative ways reflective of their intelligence and cunning. Believe me...none of that was happening here.

The most pitiful aspect of the book was her inclusion of adequately politically correct characters...I'm supposing to add to the "coolness" factor in today's media world. I could have accepted the idea of a gay best friend. That could happen even though it's a totally overused gimmick in much of the schlock stories you see used in cable TV series, but then to add another character with gender identity problems was just taking it a bit too far for no substantial reason especially given the focus of what the main story was supposed to be about. She would have been better off focusing on the execution of the plot by intelligent people than these sort of gimmicks that added nothing of real substance. You don't have to have a degree in mathematics to understand the very low probability of both of those type of characters playing a substantial part in one person's life given the rather tiny ratio of those people in society as a whole.

I will freely admit that I may have had too high an expectation for this book given that most of my reading comes from much more well developed authors of thrillers and mysteries...but believe me when I say this author is no Nelson DeMille or Michael Connelly, so don't go in with that kind of expectation and you might be okay.

Ignore the readers that are complaining

This book was different on many levels. It’s so easy to follow along and kept me guessing. I’m usually someone to figure the story out before the end. But I was even surprised.
But the very end didn’t give me a smile. BUT I completely see where the author was going and when I think along that line; it was beautiful.
It’s worth the listen!