Guest Review: Stealing Midnight by Tracy MacNish
Aug 20, 2019 04:00 am | Guest Reviewer
This guest review is a follow up from a Solved HaBO, and it comes from Lisa!
A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.
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CW/TW: Physical and emotional abuse of child, animal abuse and death, coersive sex, drugged sex, rape and sex with consent issues attached.
All the way back in February 2019, I submitted a HaBO about a Historical I’d been looking around for.
It was a historical – I want to say it’s roughly set in the late 1800s London. A kind of a Frankenstein pastiche.
The heroine is the abused daughter of a disgraced doctor. She’s forced to assist him as he does medical/resurrection experiments on the stolen (dead) bodies of wastrels. Hero is a “corpse” the father steals, is very much alive (duh), and an amnesiac Duke-or-Earl
Fortunately, I got a positive answer from Megan Frampton quite quickly. When someone in the comments suggested I submit a guest review of the book, I couldn’t resist asking Sarah if she’d be cool with it. Thus, I buried my nose back in the novel I half-remembered.
What I found was a book that was a little different from what I remembered it to be – better in some ways and worse in others.
Prepare yourself for epic Gothic Frankenstein pastiche.
It’s 1806, and Olwyn Gawain works reluctantly beside her father conducting medical experiments on the bodies of stolen corpses in the dungeon of the family’s keep. Her father, Rhys, is obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life and defeating death. Shunned by polite company and far removed from his days as a trusted doctor, even the resurrection men paid to bribe the cemetery’s night watchmen and strip the corpses before delivering them to the Gawains would rather not spend much time at Rhys’ rumbling castle home.
Then unexpectedly two corpses instead of one are delivered to their keep on foggy evening. One is notably muscled and healthy looking, and Olwyn uses him as an excuse to sketch a still-life while her father dissects the other body. To her horror, she begins to feel attraction to the naked man lying before her.
Well, to be fair to her... But Olwyn’s no necrophile! To her relief, there’s life in the corpse’s blue eyes. When her father goes to pull out his liver, she holds him at bay with a scalpel. Olwyn has run away before to disastrous consequences, but never has she openly defied her emotionally abusive father with such passion; she knows she has to flee at once. Throwing the object of her affection over her shoulders, she makes haste for the outside world with the assistance of her father’s servant and leaves her childhood home behind.
The last thing Aidan Mullin remembers is being stricken by the croup while on a boat. He sailed off because he was reluctant to assume the mantle of the dukedom he is set to inherit from his father. Presumed dead by the ship’s crew, he’d been set for a burial in a mass grave when he’d been plucked from the pile of corpses and delivered to the Gawains.
In spite of inclement conditions and their rural location, Olwyn’s nursing works a miracle and brings him back to life. To protect himself, he tells Olwyn his name is Lóchrann, a romantic name pulled from his childhood. Together the two of them begin to travel to Aiden’s home, sparring along the way.
Even as Aidan and Olwyn approach home, their blossoming love becomes more and more improbable. For Aidan is betrothed to the lovely but snobbish artist Mira Kimball – who, in turn, has begun to scheme to pull Aidan and Olwyn apart with Aidan’s jealous twin, Padraig.
Stealing Midnight is a dark, deep dive into some very gothic subject material. It addresses some big, ugly themes and it’s got some nicely florid and overheated dialogue that appeals to me in a way that’s wholly id-dy. Sometimes it’s cheesy in very good ways – like with Olwyn’s friendship with Camille, a dressmaker, and Aidan’s relationship with his steel-willed grandmother and grandfather. His grandma is in fact amazing enough to support her own story. It’s hard to hate a book that serves up characters like her.
And then there are moments like Olwyn seeing herself as beautiful for the first time
But there was one fact that was irrefutable.
“I am beautiful,” she whispered.
“You did not know?” Camille asked, standing beside her in the mirror…..
“All my life (her father) told me I was hideous,” Olwyn said, choking the words out. “He told me that no man would want me, that I was a piebald beast of a woman.”
Camille moved closer, and she put a hand on Olwyn’s back, a comforting pressure. “He lied to control you,” she said simply. “‘Tis cruel but effective.”
…He was still a liar, but she was no longer his victim. Like her mother before her, Olwyn, had escaped.
Me, when I reread this part:
But the main thrust of the story ends up muddled and distracted thanks to several poor plot choices.
Chief among the book’s good points is Olwyn. Her story of recovery is touching and beautifully rendered, providing the book’s most captivating journey. She learns how to value herself as a person and see herself as worthy, smart, tough and beautiful while recovering from the emotional abuse her father heaped upon her, and the trauma of a dog attack. In the case of the latter she gets over the memories with the help of Aidan’s sweet natured dog, Chase.
CW For Animal Abuse and Death
Unfortunately Chase meets a violent on-page ending that will be triggering for many readers.
Aidan and Olwyn’s romance is good – fraught with forbidden tension, solid affirmation, and smoking hot sexual chemistry. There are some very lovely passages filled with steamy descriptions of their desire for one another.
Seriously, look at how cute they are:
“You fit me better than anyone on this earth.”
“I don’t, and you saying so does not make it so.”
“You fit me.”
“I am exactly wrong for you.”
“You woke me.”
“No, my father’s scalpel did that.”
“You make me feel alive, Olwyn.”
“I’m poor,” she finally breathed, unable to keep air in her lungs.
“I’m not exactly looking for a woman with dowry, aye? I have money. What I don’t have is you.”
Once again, he wasn’t listening. “I’m uncultured.”
“You’re perfect.”
“I’m not certain I could learn even half of what is expected of me.”
His voice came warm and resonant within the shadowed light. “If you change in the slightest, I’ll never forgive you.”
“I don’t know what to say to get through to you.”
“Tell me how you feel about me.”
“I love you.”
But there are some serious flaws that drag the book down for me. Aidan is a mixed bag of a hero. While he is noble and self-sacrificing with Olwyn and his grandfather, he treats Mira – his supposed fiancee – abominably. The difference between how he desperately resists having sex with Olwyn, knowing the worth of her virtue is high and one of the few things she can control, and how he treats Mira, sets up an odd dichotomy that telegraphs her true role in the book and makes it hard to like him.
Honestly, a lot of my annoyance with the book revolves around Mira, who along with Padraig absorbs far too much of the book’s narrative attention span. We get a POV chapter from the two of them before we even meet Aidan! Mira’s machinations come to an almost hilariously genteel ending, but in the face of the book’s bigger conflicts – Olwyn’s self-hatred and her father’s dogged pursuit of her – they feel beside the point.
Mira’s existence within the book also brings about an unsavory and wholly unnecessary plot point.
TW/CW for major consent issues and coercion
“I said I didn’t want a repeat of that night. Why do you press me?”
“The night things went too far, you were different.”
“No, I was as I always am. ‘Twas you who was drunk, and who would not listen for my pleas to stop.”
“Aye, I drank too much, but I was not so drunk, Mira. I remember more than you might realize, and your pleas were mingled with touches and sighs and passionate kisses.”
Look. We all have lines we won’t cross:
But wait. There’s more.
That dialogue is followed by the revelation that…
TW/CW for MORE consent issues, coercion, and rape
Mira drugged his wine in the hope of sealing their engagement and raped him on that fateful evening described above – she later adulterates his food in the hope of raping him again. This is very uncomfortable material and quite unnecessary to the plot. It’s more like drama for the sake of squirmworthy, gross drama.
Worse, this scene is immediately followed by Aidan trying to get Mira her drunk on his home-brewed whisky so she can “loosen up” and “treat him like a real person instead of the Duke” (Do not get me started on Aidan’s issues with being a duke, they are annoying and ridiculous because he’s been training his whole life to be a duke and argh!).
This is flat-out disgusting behavior for both of them. Trying to get a woman drunk to expose her ‘true nature’ as a ‘passionate woman’ is appallingly wrong; intoxicating a man in the hope of getting pregnant to “seal” a marriage is wrong. Mira never really gets punished for her crimes, either, and she says things like “women cannot rape men.” Her storyline is just plain unnecessary and awful.
In rediscovering Stealing Midnight, I found the part of myself that used to devour Catherine Coulter and Johanna Lindsay novels, the girl who thought they were the pinnacle of romance-writing perfection. The good parts of Stealing Midnight – like Olwyn’s journey of self-discovery, the tenderness of her romance with Aidan, the road trip they undertake, the heavy Frankenstein homages, the book’s fairytale allusions, everything to do with Olwyn’s friendship with the dressmaker Camille and her search for her mother- still shine.
The bad parts – like everything to do with Mira, the plot her character brings about, the animal abuse, and Olwyn and Aidan having sex for the first time while he was hopped up on aphrodesiacs – I hadn’t remembered because I hadn’t wished to.
I’ll take the good parts of the book with me as I continue to read more romance. It was an interesting trip, but not one I’m not going to take again.
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