Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton is a beautifully written, sparse post-apocalyptic novel that explores memory, loss and identity. The narrative moves seamlessly ... . Fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora will appreciate the Brooks-Dalton’s exquisite exploration of relationships in extreme environments.
What particularly undermines the high-concept story is writing that calls attention to itself. It pulls the reader out of what novelist John Gardner called the dream ... The narrative dream of Good Morning, Midnight is intruded on by logically incoherent sentences...prose that veers toward purple, and metaphors that try too hard or else are oddly anthropomorphic ... Ambiguous syntax is unintentionally hilarious ... This is not to say the book isn’t worth the effort, but it could move more. Obstacles arise, such as a severed communications antenna, but they are too easily solved.
Beautiful descriptions create a sense of wonder and evoke feelings of desolation while Brooks-Dalton’s heartfelt debut novel unfolds at a perfect pace as it asks readers what will be left when everything in the world is gone.
Brooks-Dalton...is a writer who loves grand gestures, and she’s at her best when writing about the epic settings that anchor the book, as the arctic and deep space give Brooks-Dalton outlets that match her scope. However, both the plot and the writing itself frequently fall into this same grandiosity: when an apocalypse is the least dramatic part of a novel, one wonders if Brooks-Dalton might have gotten the same amount of punch with less extravagance. An apocalyptic soap opera set in vividly imagined environments.
Brooks-Dalton’s prose lights up the page in great swathes, her dialogue sharp and insightful, and the high-concept plot drives a story of place, elusive love, and the inexorable yearning for human contact. Although the book’s two parallel threads often read less like a novel than a pair of expertly crafted—if only tangentially related—novellas, the memorable characters explore complex questions that resonate with the urgency of a glimpse into the void.
