Better Than Running at Night

Overview

Hillary Frank's novel follows a teenage art student as she trades the density and familiarity of Manhattan for the quiet, unfamiliar rhythms of a New England campus. The move is less about geography than about the abrupt loss of a known self: new routines, new classmates, and a new measure of independence arrive all at once, with no instruction manual.

Told through the lens of a young artist, the book treats image-making and observation as tools the protagonist uses to process what's happening to her, even as her new environment keeps outpacing her ability to make sense of it. The freshman-year setting gives the story a built-in structure: arrival, disorientation, and the slow, uneven work of finding footing.

The novel sits comfortably in the tradition of coming-of-age fiction that follows a single formative year rather than a whole life, trusting that the small, specific details of one first year away from home can carry a larger story about growing up.

An Artist's Eye on Leaving Home

Frank's choice to center an art student lets the book use visual thinking as a narrative device: the protagonist's sketches and observations become a way of processing a world that no longer matches her expectations. That framing situates the novel among coming-of-age stories that use a creative practice — writing, music, photography — as both subject and structure, letting the art itself mirror the character's shifting sense of self.

The book also belongs to a particular strand of young-adult and campus fiction concerned with the first real separation from family: the disorientation of unfamiliar social codes, the test of values formed at home against a new set of peers, and the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people while still feeling unmoored. Read this way, the New England setting functions less as scenery than as a pressure test for who the protagonist is when nothing around her is familiar.

Why Better Than Running at Night Has Been Challenged

A parent raising concerns about the book has typically pointed to its frank handling of a teenage character's sexual experiences and relationships away from parental oversight, arguing that the material is inappropriate for the age group most likely to encounter it on a school shelf. The complaint centers less on any single scene than on the book's overall candor about a young woman's early independence — social, romantic, and physical — once she is removed from home supervision.

Related objections have focused on the novel's depiction of underage drinking and other unsupervised behavior common to first-year college life, with challengers arguing that presenting these choices without overt condemnation amounts to normalizing them for younger readers. Taken together, these concerns reflect a broader disagreement over whether realistic portrayals of a teenager's first steps into adulthood belong in school libraries at all, or whether they require restriction to protect younger students from content some parents consider too mature. The book has been formally challenged in 1 state and 1 school district tracked in this catalog.