Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Midnight Robber

Reviews tagging 'Sexual assault'

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

27 reviews

reggiethebird's review

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adventurous emotional inspiring slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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pageglue's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Wow! This was such a unique, wild reading experience for me. I think it’s better to go into it not knowing much about the story, but as an appetiser:
- it’s Caribbean sci-fi, with a lot of real world references: the planet is called Toussaint, AI personal assistants are called Eshu, references to Taino folklore etc.
- the book is written in ‘Anglopatwa’ - basically Jamaican patois
- one of the themes is the crossover of mythology and history

Weirdly enough, a lot of the story was world building, which I would normally hate, but it was done in a really dynamic and thought-provoking (philosophical even) way. It took me a little while to become accustomed to the language, but if you’ve read anything like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Clockwork Orange, you will similarly get used to it pretty quickly. In fact, even though the story started out kind of slow, I found myself really immersed in it, and I think that was mainly due to the narrative voice.

Another strange thing is that even though A LOT happens in this book, it didn’t feel plot-driven, and at two-thirds of the way through I even felt like the story hadn’t begun yet. But everything that transpired was unexpected (and sometimes quite dark) and kept me wanting to find out what happens next. I was even quite anxious for the last 10% of the book, hoping the protagonist would be okay. There’s a great cast of characters, but due to the nature of the plot, we don’t get to spend a lot of time with many of them.

I feel like the key word for this book is ‘dynamic’: there was a lot going on that interconnected really well and it had this push-pull effect on the reader to engage with its themes both within the story and without. It felt really lively, and it was just really good!

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