The City in The Middle Of The Night by Charlie Jane Anders

#BookReview The City In The Middle Of The Night by Charlie Jane Anders

My rating: 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

Pages: 368

Publisher: Titan Books

Available: 12 February 2019

Genre: Young Adult / Dystopian / Fantasy / Fiction / Science Fantasy

Blurb:

January is a dying planet–divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans–and Sophie’s ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

My Thoughts:

I really, Truly and thoroughly enjoyed this book! So much so that I’m really not all that certain where I should start! So, I will begin with the Characters.

I loved them, and I really enjoyed seeing how they developed. What made this special for me, is tat the Characters aren’t out of this world perfect, or entirely unable to be liked, rather they were real. They made stupid-ass decisions, they made good decisions, selfless and selfish, some went well and some did not. Choices were made based on others, or their own preconceptions, or on pure, stupid and very human misunderstandings. I LOVED that about them!

To me, this made the characters, and the world on the whole much more plausible! Nobody was perfect, they made choices that didn’t go the way they intended, and that affected those around them in unforseen ways. In a world that is based on Science Fiction? That’s a brilliant skill.

Now the world building. Just WOW. I loved the idea of a tidal locked world, with the two sides complete opposites and class and culture being based upon where you lived! There were several parallels with cultural norms we have now, that it again was easily plausible. Ways of life had been built that make sense for a future humanity!

And the creatures 😱 oh my goodness, I WANT TO GO THERE!! This world is wild, untamed and unpredictable. The creatures are wonderfully unique and unexpected, and the way in which humanity misunderstands them through ignorance, well that just seems perfectly feasible too!

This was a wonderful story to read, I loved Mouth and Sophie equally for very different reasons, though at times I must admit I wanted to kick Sophie in the shin for a lack of good sense 🙈

If you enjoy your Young Adult Fantasy with enough plausibility to make you wonder if the Author has been to the future, then you will adore this book!

About The Author:

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the former editor-in-chief of io9.com, the extraordinarily popular Gawker Media site devoted to science fiction and fantasy. Her SF and fantasy debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, won the 2017 Nebula Awards for Best Novel and was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award’s Best Novel category. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.