“It’s a midnight lie, she said. A kind of lie told for someone else’s sake, a lie that sits between goodness and wrong, just as midnight is the moment between night and morning.”
An epic LGBTQ romantic fantasy about learning to free ourselves from the lies others tell us—and the lies we tell ourselves. Here is my review of The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski:
THE PLOT, CHARACTERS AND STORY PROGRESSION
This book. Wow–
It has been a really, really long time since I read a book and related to a character like I did Nirrim. The Midnight Lie came during a time in my life where I was struggling with my own betrayals and the lies I had been sold by someone close to me. Reading the way Nirrim would talk about trusting people and the guilt she would feel about her own lies to other people. It perfectly represented not only how I felt about being so brutally lied to but also how that person probably felt about the lies they told. Marie did an impeccable job of being balanced and representative of every side of the coin when it comes to the truth and deception and it is truly beautiful.
“but I did know. It was because I was incapable of seeing something for what it truly was.”
The relationship between Nirrim and Raven too. I felt this so deeply, being abused by someone who you think is doing it for your own good. Being too young and naive to see the damage it is doing and unhealthy it is. Wanting to see the bright shining light in everyone and completely disregarding the bad. Covering it up and making excuses for it just so you don’t have to see it.
“When she lost her temper, and hurt me, she was always so tender afterward, as though I were her treasure… And didn’t parents correct their children, so that they would learn?”
Her toxic relationship with Aden, how she described feeling pressured and kissing someone she knew she didn’t want to kiss. Feeling trapped in a place you just want to escape from but see no way out.
So many times in this book I could put myself exactly in her shoes and almost has flashbacks to my own memories where I felt all of these things and had the exact same thoughts.
“And I was the one who thought, This will always be my life: kissing someone I don’t love. Living in a city I will never leave.”
WORLD BUILDING, ATMOSPHERE AND SETTING
The world Marie has conjured up in The Midnight Lie is absolutely beautiful. I could picture it so vividly in my head. What every person looked like and their expressions as they spoke. We read this as part of our work book club and we discussed how we imagined the bird looked like. It’s amazing how whilst reading we all picture things slightly differently. I imagined a long feathered blood red bird and one of my colleagues pictured a rainbow bird.
My only critique is that at some points I felt lost, like there was scenes or filler that could have been left out. It distracted me from the main plot and made it hard to get through some of the middle parts of the story. Instead of being able to effortlessly sore through to the end, I’d pick it up for a couple days at a time during the slower parts.
THE VERDICT?
As a whole however, The Midnight Lie absolutely blew me away and I’m ashamed it sat on my shelf for so long unread, a gem waiting to be consumed and seen for what it truly was, a beautiful YA masterpiece with an important message about trust and the power of our words and actions on the people closest to us.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐