Reviews with content warning for Panic attacks/disorders - The City in the Middle of the Night

I have read Victories Greater Than Death and Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and I will say that Anders is SO creative in her worlds and concepts, but it is certainly not for everyone. She kind of throws you into this world without a ton of explanation and you gain knowledge as you read. It can become confusing and overwhelming at times. But after some time, the world starts to make sense and January, as a planet, feels fleshed out.

I really enjoyed the dual POV between Sophie and Mouth (with an interesting choice having Sophie's in 1st person and Mouth's in 3rd person?), as both characters went through a lot of growth and development. And I understand the using the concept of someone constantly being drawn back into a toxic friendship as character growth- it's realistic and difficult to escape. "When you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags." But SO many times I just wanted to shake my dear, sweet Sophie and tell her that

Bianca is NOT a good friend. She's manipulative, mean, selfish, and dismissive of Sophie CONSTANTLY.

It got really frustrating for me at times (and I acknowledge that's me as a reader, not necessarily a flaw in the book itself- just be aware that you might throw your hands up in frustration from time to time).

I really enjoyed the first and last sections of this book. The middle has some pacing issues, in my opinion, with plot elements I wasn't super connected with. At times it felt like nothing was happening and then suddenly it's absolute chaos and I wonder if I accidentally skipped over some pages. But I absolutely LOVED all of the parts relating to the Gelet and their society and Sophie's connection with them. The environmental aspect mixed with the ugliness of human nature was very well-established. I wish we got more time with them, especially as the ending felt like it wrapped up too quickly.

Overall, an enjoyable read, but definitely frustrating at times with certain character decisions and pacing that just wasn't for me.

Content Warnings

sophiaforever's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I liked this book, but I didn't love it. The plot is that humanity reached for the stars but got marooned on a tidally locked planet, January. There's some neat descriptions of the planet like how the main city was built between two giant mountains the terminator so one mountain protects them from the heat of the sun and the other prevents gusts of wind from freezing everyone. There's an ocean where you can stand on your boat and without moving if you look nightward you can see it freeze and towards the day you can see it boil. Lots of little neat things like that.

And from a technical aspect, she does some really interesting things that help you put yourself in the story. One of the things she brings up is that without any day/night cycle, everyone begins having trouble not only regulating their sleep/wake cycle, but just knowing what time it is. And so she completely removes any mention of units of time that we would recognize from her story. Days or weeks can pass in a single paragraph but you have no idea you just have to kinda guess how long it's been. From beginning to end, at minimum it's been a year our time but at most? It could easily have been five to ten years and possibly more based on how long it takes to do certain things

(multiple people completely recover from major injuries and surgeries for instance)

The book is also split between two POV characters, Mouth and Sophie. Mouth's chapters are written 3rd person ("Mouth went over there, then went over there.") whereas Sophie's are written 2nd person ("I go over here, then I go over here."). I thought it would bug me more than it does but you get used to it pretty quickly.

But even all of that considered, I'm still not in love with the book. I think it's because the author is focusing more on the aspects of the world that I don't find really interesting. I fully acknowledge that the problem is with me so I don't want to give it a BAD review when I can tell it's a good book it's just not to my tastes. The time-ambiguousness of it is disorienting which I get is the point but it also damages my enjoyment of the book. One of the characters has a lot going on but because that stuff isn't relevant to Sophie, you don't actually get to know much about it. Kinda like if you read a story about Jimmy Olson at the Daily Planet and Jimmy knows Clark Kent is Superman but because only Clark's journalism career is relevant to Jimmy's story you don't ever get to see any superman stuff.

In the end, I just didn't love it, but I don't want to give a bad review because it's more about me just wanting something else rather than it being bad.

Content Warnings

novelyon's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

puttingwingsonwords's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

perditorian's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional reflective medium-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

3.0

Content Warnings

mireanthony's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring tense fast-paced

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

5.0

I put down this book after I finished it and intended to review it the very next day, but then I got sidetracked and here I am a good week later hoping to do it justice but knowing I'm going to fall short. Oh, well.

I read Charlie Jane Anders' novel All the Birds in the Sky in summer of 2016 as my relationship with my college boyfriend was ending and I was trying to figure out what to do after I graduated, and it affected me to an extent I could never explain or justify. My strange kinship with that book, the feeling that it had somehow been written for me and my circumstances specifically, followed me through The City in the Middle of the Night, as well. I couldn't even begin to guess at why exactly I feel this way, except to say that this book, like All the Birds in the Sky, understands that what makes good science fiction is philosophy, not technology.

Between when I read All the Birds in the Sky and when I read this book I learned that Charlie Jane Anders is a trans woman. I remember the day I stumbled upon her twitter and something clicked. Oh, I thought, oh, that's why her writing resonates so much with me. She's trans, as well. I couldn't help but read The City in the Middle of the Night through a lens of queer transformation and the friction between society and the individual that transformation causes. It's not a hard read to do; the themes are central to the story.

The City in the Middle of the Night follows Sophie as she grows from a teenager who lacks words to communicate her burgeoning attraction to her best friend Bianca, through a series of traumatic events involving police, politics, and the system of timekeeping on Sophie's tidally locked planet. Xiosphant, one of two cities in the twilight strip between the light side and dark side of the planet January, operates under strict and meticulous order, a substitute for a daynight cycle turned into an oppressive system for keeping the townspeople docile and controlled. Sophie and Bianca are part of a group of teenage dissidents more concerned with sitting around discussing philosophy than actually doing anything, until Sophie taking the fall for a minor crime of Bianca's leads to the police parading her through the town and forcing her into the frozen wastelands of the dark side of the planet, forcing her into the night to die. But Sophie does not die, because she meets a creature there that can communicate using touch telepathy and is a member of a race that has inhabited the night since long before the colony ships came to January, since before humans discovered fire. The creature, a gelet, shows Sophie a memory of a city deep in the night, a city kept alive through bioengineering but also through collective memory, collective will, and a love story that the gelet have mythologized into their religion and politics.

This is not always a happy book, and it is a little slow-paced at some points, but it is full of delicious worldbuilding and the kind of commentary on our world that only science fiction can really touch. It is an meditation on the nature of communication, religion, memory, trauma, time, and love. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a perfect science fiction book. And it's queer!

Content Warnings

More...