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lesserjoke 's review for:
The Midnight Girls
by Alicia Jasinska
A fun little queer enemies-to-lovers YA fantasy, but with some tonal and worldbuilding issues that are keeping me at a slight distance. The two antiheroines are teenaged assistants to rival witches, tasked with hunting down victims and ripping their hearts out to fuel their mistresses' magic. They clash whenever they're sent after the same target, but strike up a flirty friendship when they meet under cover identities and don't recognize one another right away.
So that's cute, but it's hard to get too invested in the struggles of two adolescent mass murderers who are generally pretty remorseless about their slaughtering. It's also not clear to me, absent fairy tale logic and/or implicit classism, why the witches need princely organs specifically, rather than those of any random peasants. And while I appreciate author Alicia Jasinka's gesture at diversity by periodically mentioning Jews and Muslims in this fictionalized version of 18th-century Poland, I have serious questions about why the church prayers and holy relics are effective protection against the girls. (If Christian rituals are visibly potent as spells, that should have major implications for religious minorities in the area!) Considering those drawbacks, I'm ultimately only lukewarm on this title, but I'm glad that a sapphic teen romance like this -- even a F/F/F love triangle at one point -- has become no big deal in the modern publishing landscape.
[Content warning for gore.]
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So that's cute, but it's hard to get too invested in the struggles of two adolescent mass murderers who are generally pretty remorseless about their slaughtering. It's also not clear to me, absent fairy tale logic and/or implicit classism, why the witches need princely organs specifically, rather than those of any random peasants. And while I appreciate author Alicia Jasinka's gesture at diversity by periodically mentioning Jews and Muslims in this fictionalized version of 18th-century Poland, I have serious questions about why the church prayers and holy relics are effective protection against the girls. (If Christian rituals are visibly potent as spells, that should have major implications for religious minorities in the area!) Considering those drawbacks, I'm ultimately only lukewarm on this title, but I'm glad that a sapphic teen romance like this -- even a F/F/F love triangle at one point -- has become no big deal in the modern publishing landscape.
[Content warning for gore.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog