Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - The City in the Middle of the Night

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TL;DR REVIEW:

While The City in the Middle of the Night didn’t grab me as much as I’d hoped it would, I definitely thought it was really creative and well written.

For you if: You like soft sci-fi tinged with environmentalism and political upheaval.

FULL REVIEW:

“You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.”

The City in the Middle of the Night was my last read of the 2020 Hugo Award list of nominees. And while I definitely thought it was creative and well written, I’m sad to say that it was a little bit of a letdown for me — it just didn’t grab me the way I’d hoped or expected it to. BUT that could definitely be a me thing and my jittery headspace the last few weeks and not the book — so don’t let me be the reason you don’t read this! (I also absolutely love Charline Jane Anders and her other work that I’ve read, and I’m definitely going to keep reading her going forward.)

The book alternates between two women: Sophie and Mouth (yes, she’s called Mouth — there are a lot of strangely named things in this book). They live in one of two main cities on a planet called January, in the sliver of habitable space between scorching sunlight and unforgiving, freezing night. Early in the book, Sophie takes the fall for something dumb her roommate, Bianca (with whom she is falling in love) did, and the police make an example of her, which brings her into contact with the night and its inhabitants. Mouth, on the other hand, is uncouth and scrappy, and she’s also the only surviving member of a society of traveling nomads, and she grapples with her identity, her memories, and where she fits.

All in all, this book has a lot going for it. The relationship between Sophie and Bianca is compelling and hard to look away from, and Mouth’s character arc was a lot more of a journey than I’d expected. There are themes of environmentalism and totalitarianism and more. It just didn’t necessarily keep me hooked, and it took me nine days to finish (whereas I usually average more like three or four).

Anyway, TL;DR: I liked this okay but didn’t love it, but that could be a me thing, and there is plenty here to love.

Content Warnings

perditorian's review against another edition

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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

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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

katieconrad's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

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