The beautiful cover of Good morning, midnight (affiliate link) was what grabbed my attention first. I am a sucker for dark nights, and as the spring is arriving here in Iceland the nights are becoming shorter and shorter. Then I turned the book around and I was sold. The book sounded intriguing and seemed to have a hint of supernatural elements. SOLD!

The blurp

Augustine, a brilliant, ageing scientist, is consumed by the stars. He has spent his entire life searching for the origins of time itself. He has now been left alone on a remote research base in the Arctic circle, all communications with the outside world broken down. But then he discovers a mysterious child, Iris, who must have hidden herself away when the last of his colleagues departed.

Sully is a divorced mother. She is also an astronaut, currently aboard the Aether on a return flight from Jupiter. This is the culmination of her career, the very reason for all the sacrifices she has made – the daughter she left behind, the marriage she couldn’t save. But then something goes wrong with the ship’s communication system.

Marooned in the vast silence of space and the achingly beautiful sweep of the Arctic, both Augustine and Sully must find a way to make peace with the choices they have made and find a path to redemption.

My thoughts on the book

I was always waiting for something more, that maybe the next page had something more and then it dawned on me. There was nothing more with this book. Don’t get me wrong, the book isn’t badly written. It is simply missing another layer, some sort of mystique or simply following the structure of a plot. There was just nothing! It didn’t help that the last sentence of the book was supposed to be this major twist, and it was something that was obvious as soon as the characters were introduced. But that is just how the entire book felt, just so obvious.

It just feels like a really, really long introduction to a novel. A long character introduction that isn’t even that deep. I didn’t feel like I knew the characters at all at the end of the book, even though the entire book is basically explaining why they do the things they do. With some sprinkles of unfortunate sex scenes that could have been edited out. There is also this play on maternal/paternal love in mix with lack of maternal/paternal love. It was just strange.

I think I am quite disappointed with the book because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL! There was so many ways the plot could have gone, so much that could have been fleshed out, so many obvious twists taken out.

I think I will rate this book 1 out of 5 and claim that this is the worst book I have read this year. Which is sad.

That is it for today! What books should I add to my reading list?

-Katrin