Book #165 of 2021:
The Light of the Midnight Stars by Rena Rossner
The mini-genre of Jewish fantasy / fabulism has been booming lately, which is wonderful for #ownvoices representation and a chance to see myself in such stories, but also means readers can afford to be a little more discerning about what’s on offer. And this novel, unfortunately, doesn’t quite soar with the best of its lot for me. I love the idea that the traditional prayers of Judaism can enact real magic from healing to pyromancy to shapeshifting and beyond, but have difficulty relating to the three sisters who are our protagonists. Their perspectives are too similar to one another — as are their respective lovers — and the occasional reminder that they’re around bat mitzvah age makes it harder for me to stomach or understand the focus on sex and marriage, despite the fourteenth-century Hungarian setting. I’m not really clicking with the conceit of everyone repeatedly retelling events from their lives as thinly-disguised fairy tales, either.
There are still enough good qualities in this book for me to award it three-out-of-five stars. An outburst of pogrom violence at the midpoint is well-rendered in its awful brutality, and I like that author Rena Rossner finds room for a queer romance later on in the text, no matter how fraught it must be for those times. But overall I haven’t enjoyed this title as much as the writer’s previous work The Sisters of the Winter Wood or other recent examples of Judaic speculative fiction.
[Content warning for rape and live burial.]
★★★☆☆
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