Hey guys, Katie here! Today I want to talk about
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT by Lily Brooks-Dalton.
This book was named after another
book of the same name by Jean Rhys.
I loved her book, WIDE SARGASSO SEA, so,
now I'm definitely curious to read
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT by Jean Rhys, but
I've heard it is notoriously depressing,
so, I think I will save it for some time
when I'm in a really good mind frame to read that.
GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT came out a couple
of weeks ago, and I was dying to read it,
so I just picked up the hardback. I don't
usually do that but I'm really glad that
I did because it's such a beautiful
novel, and I think that is one of the
things that really drew me to it, is that
is written beautifully. I think Lily Brooks-Dalton
is a very good writer and the
whole book, I could really see it, feel it
hear it--you know, all that jazz.
It was very immersive, which is something
that I really appreciate. When I was
reading I felt like I was there, and
I can't say enough about how enjoyable it was to read.
The story is about two
people: a man named Augustine or Auggie, and a
woman named Sully. Auggie lives in the
Arctic, and he decided to stay behind
when they evacuated all the other
scientists--he's an astronomer--but then
he finds that he's not alone; there's a
little girl named Iris there with him.
He's kind of like, an older man. He
believes the end of his life. So, they
evacuate everybody, and then the world
just goes silent.
Sully is a--an astronaut in space. She is like the communications
officer for this spaceship that went to
Jupiter, and is on its way back when it
finds out that they cannot communicate
with earth anymore. They can't hear them--
there's complete radio silence, and that
story is very interesting, because you
really get to experience the different
stages of grief as the crew kind of
deals with the possibility of not being
able to go home, or what would they find
when they got home because obviously
probably everyone knew is dead.
As you can tell, this book is very sad. It is
pretty somber. Auggie spends a lot of time
kind of contemplating his life and how
he behaved,
and, you know, the things that he missed.
And Sully does the same thing, really,
only in a different environment. But I
think that the ending is a good mix of
hopeful and disastrous, and I really
enjoyed that. I think this is a really
interesting take on the post-apocalyptic
literary novel, because it's just quiet,
and that's it. And we don't know what happened,
we don't know even, you know, towards the
end, there's really no indication of what
happened to just erase the entire human
population except for these few people
who happen to be spared by their
locations. So many post-apocalyptic
novels focus on struggling surviving and
in harsh conditions and things like that
or the repercussions of, you know, our
society on future societies. You know, how
how climate change destroys the Earth and things
like that.
This is just straight-up, it's done it's
over, and who knows why. And everybody has
to cope with that. You know, I mentioned
earlier that it's very sad and usually
I'm really careful about reading books
that are sad, because I'm afraid that
they're going to make me depressed, but I
didn't have trouble with that, and I
think that's because there's always this
hint of hope. And maybe that's sort
of a theme of the book. I don't really
and really know for sure how I feel
about it. But, there's always sort of a
hint of "maybe we'll contact somebody" from
both ends. You know, they're both kind of
dealing with that, and I think that kept
me up enough that I could manage to read
this very sad book and a sad reflection
of life regrets.
I don't think that this book will appeal
to anyone
who is looking for super heavy plot.
This is really kind of a character study
and kind of an inward look at how we
cope, how we grieve. But if you're
interested in those sorts of things--you
know--just enjoying developing characters,
this is the book for you and I highly
recommend it. Somebody mentioned that the
cover looks like STATION ELEVEN and I
definitely see that similarity. And once
I saw that similarity, I realized that
this is a good book for people who like
STATION ELEVEN. So if you like STATION ELEVEN,
that's also a good reason to pick this up.
I hope that this review was helpful
to you. I didn't say as much as I thought
I would, but then again I'm trying really
hard to make this usable, so let me know
if this inspired you to pick up the book
or if you read the book or whatever and
let's talk in the comments about that.
And I will see you guys next time, bye!
