Thank you TBR and Beyond Tours for the chance to read and review Midnight Strikes by Zeba Shahnaz! I’m so happy to be on this book tour for a fantastic female Pakistani-American writer!
Midnight Strikes is Zeba Shahnaz’s debut novel! This 443 page long book was released on the 14th of March and was published by Delacorte Press.
Most of us have encountered the time loop trope because of the movie Groundhog day, where a man relives the same day over and over again. Zeba Shahnaz’s story, told from the point of view of Anaïs, a young woman from a marginalized community from the edge of the kingdom, makes brilliant use of this device to illustrate the trauma of living and surviving catastrophic events. Keep in mind, the rest of my post will have spoilers, so skip ahead to the blurb if you don’t want to read those.
There are many things to like about Midnight Strikes, we have interesting magic systems and even better characters. As Anais travels back to that night and meets them over and over again, sometimes having conversations she would never have had otherwise, she gets to know them and even love them differently. It was heartbreaking to see her at the end with Leo, she has fallen in love with all the sides of him she’s seen; this prince who believes when no one in their sane mind would.
I also want to talk about the arranged marriages in the book because it’s so intimately a brown girl problem. Anais makes it clear she isn’t looking for love and romance and all the things we should, ideally speaking, hope for. She’s just looking for someone bearable. Someone who can maybe turn out to be a friend in the long run. This theme also continues with Clara and her marriage; her father loves her, and his begging at the end made me feel like she would have been forgiven, regardless of all the havoc she wreaked. But despite all that she is, her worth to him and the kingdom, he tells her only after her marriage is arranged, as though she is a bystander and not a main component.
There are also more familiar tropes; money isn’t all, breeding and nobility matters just a bit more. People want more than a police state, but that’s all this kingdom knows how to give them.