Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. I’m back today after a week of work and writing. It snowed this week. Boo. I’m ready for spring and summer. But enough about that. Today, I want to talk about a great book I finished a few weeks ago. It’s titled “In the Midnight Room.”
The cover and blurb are below.
“If McBride is trying to prove—that if you change one life, you change the world—she succeeds magnificently.”—Booklist
From the author of the acclaimed novel We Are Called to Rise comes a “jewel of a novel” (BookPage) about four vivid and complicated women in Las Vegas whose lives become connected by secrets, courage, tragedies, and small acts of kindness.
Fun-loving and rebellious, twenty-one-year-old June Stein abandons the safe world of her New Jersey childhood for edgy 1950s Las Vegas. For the next 60 years, June will dare to live boldly. She will upend conventions, risk her heart and her life, rear a child, lose a child, love more than one man, and stand up for more than one woman.
June’s story will intertwine with those of three unlikely strangers: a one-time mail order bride from the Philippines, a high school music teacher, and a young mother from Mexico working as a hotel maid. Knit together around June’s explosive secret, they forge a future that none of them foresee.
This jubilant, compassionate novel explores the unexpected ways that life connects us, changes us, and even perfects us. A powerful story of lust and of hope, of redemption and of compassion, In the Midnight Room is a smart, sagacious novel about womanhood, family bonds, and how we live in America now.
My Thoughts:
I love the characters in this story. They’re real and flawed just like we all are. There’s one aspect of this tale that broke my heart literally. That’s when June’s husband took her baby away. This story took place in an era when diversity wasn’t embraced. He did it to protect everything he’d built and to protect his wife because the baby was the result of an affair. June had an affair with a black man, and back in this era that was unacceptable.
This story shows the strength and resilience of the human spirit. I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to have your child taken away from you. June courageously picked up the pieces and went about her life, but she always looked for that baby girl.
“In the Midnight Room” is a beautifully written tale about an era that has passed. It shows how much we’ve grown as a society, but there is still much work to be done. It’s a good read and worth the time. Laura McBride has made the list as one of my new favorite authors.
