Publisher's Synopsis
THE NIGHT CLASS is a coming of age drama, the story of Samantha (Sam) Bower, a young university teaching assistant, who is studying hard to make a career for herself as a psychologist, while also struggling to overcome the trauma of a childhood of abuse and abandonment, and navigating a journey of self-discovery. The setting is primarily a generic city in Southwestern Ontario. The main story is set within the current social context of recent Residential School revelations and Canada's need for addressing Truth and Reconciliation with its Indigenous Peoples. The secondary story is a love/hate relationship between two of the story's main characters: Hunter, a young Indigenous student, and Terri, a middle-age Caucasian woman who has returned to university as an adult student. This secondary story is a political commentary on the current state of Truth and Reconciliation in Canada.
Sam is tasked with trying to keep a racially mixed team of eight undergraduate students (including Hunter and Terri) from self-destructing as they attempt to satisfactorily complete a controversial, assigned group project on Truth and Reconciliation. While the stakes for her students are whether or not they pass or fail the course, the stakes for Sam are much greater. She is a victim of a traumatic childhood of abuse and neglect that continues to plague her as an adult. She has been struggling with her grades in grad school, has yet to decide on a thesis project, and her career goal of teaching at a university may be in jeopardy if she fails to successfully mentor her students. To further complicate matters, Sam's journey of self-discovery is turned upside-down when she discovers that her real father is Indigenous, and was a residential school survivor. The team members' individual personality quirks soon cause tempers to flare and racial tension and emotions to boil over, creating a perfect storm of dysfunction that threatens to derail both the team and Sam. In order to stay in grad school and achieve her ambition of becoming a university professor and teacher, Sam must not only keep her student team from self-destructing, but she must also overcome her own traumatic past and inner demons.
