Good Morning, Midnight in Around the Year in 52 Books

May 14, 2018 Jacqie rated it did not like it

I read this for a science fiction book club, and DID NOT like it. I think one of the main problems for me is that this is not a science fiction book. It's got the trappings, what with apocalypses and outer space, but truly it's a literary fiction book. The theme is all about the difficulties of connection and the loneliness of isolation. If you want to read the book from that standpoint you may like it better than I did, although I didn't think these themes were explored in an especially mature I read this for a science fiction book club, and DID NOT like it. I think one of the main problems for me is that this is not a science fiction book. It's got the trappings, what with apocalypses and outer space, but truly it's a literary fiction book. The theme is all about the difficulties of connection and the loneliness of isolation. If you want to read the book from that standpoint you may like it better than I did, although I didn't think these themes were explored in an especially mature manner either.

This felt to me like a book by a young author who has some work to do in maturing in her perspective and in her imagination and in her research, too. For example, I was thrown out of the book in the very first paragraph, which describes dawn breaking across the Arctic Circle for the first time after a long dark winter. I've been in the Arctic in the winter and what she described was not my experience at all- dawn in the Arctic winter is a dim twilight, not a dramatic dawn with all the colors. I suppose the couple of weeks I was up there could have been all anomaly, but it felt like something done for dramatic purposes instead of something well researched. Next, the author's 78 year old main character seemed like he was just starting to feel a bit creaky from age- no matter now fit you are, you'll notice more than a bit of stiffness at that age in extreme cold- I feel worse than that some days now and I'm almost 30 years younger than the character! :)

The contrivances of drama for the sake of furthering the theme didn't work for me either. The astronauts on the space ship didn't ring true to me as the sort of people who would be vetted for this years-long journey into space. There was tragedy which would never have happened in a real situation, with the redundancies and monitoring that professionals would use.

In the end, getting eaten by a polar bear might have been the most useful thing that any character did in the entire book. DO NOT READ if you are a science fiction lover. I'd say don't read it in any event, but clearly the multitude of good reviews show that I'm in the minority here. Now I feel isolated and alone, almost as if I was stuck in the Arctic or on a doomed space ship. :) ...more

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