Happy Monday y’all! I hope everyone had a great weekend! Mine was super busy, but in a fun, good way! Today’s my stop on the TBR and Beyond Tours tour for Midnight Strikes by Zeba Shahnaz. Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours for having me on this tour!
Midnight Strikes 4/5 Stars
Summary from Goodreads:
In this explosive fantasy debut with a time-loop twist, a provincial girl must work with a roguish prince to stop an attack on the royal family and escape a nightmarish curse that forces them to relive the same night again and again.
Seventeen-year-old Anaïs just wants tonight to end. As an outsider at the kingdom’s glittering anniversary ball, she has no desire to rub shoulders with the nation’s most eligible (and pompous) bachelors—especially not the notoriously roguish Prince Leo. But at the stroke of midnight, an explosion rips through the palace, killing everyone in its path. Including her.
The last thing Anaïs sees is fire, smoke, chaos . . . and then she wakes up in her bedroom, hours before the ball. No one else remembers the deadly attack or believes her warnings of disaster.
Not even when it happens again. And again. And again.
If she’s going to escape this nightmarish time loop, Anaïs must take control of her own fate and stop the attack before it happens. But the court’s gilded surface belies a rotten core, full of restless nobles grabbing at power, discontented commoners itching for revolution, and even royals who secretly dream of taking the throne. It’s up to Anaïs to untangle these knots of deadly deceptions . . . if she can survive past midnight.
Midnight Strikes was such an interesting book! I really liked some of the aspects around the court politics and the world building. I also liked the whole premise of everything blowing up and Anaïs being the only one who keeps reliving the day again and again, and then us finding out why it’s happening. It did feel a little monotonous in the middle with all of the combinations she tried to save things with nothing new happening, so I did feel as though I had to push myself to get through parts of the middle, but overall it was definitely an enjoyable book. The extended character list was a bit long and forgettable, but the important characters were great. And the magic system/lore within the book was pretty cool- I definitely enjoyed that! I wish the author had dug a little more into the revolution part or the motivations behind why the person who was blowing everything up was doing it, because while we were told a surface level reason, that didn’t feel satisfactory enough for me. In general though, Midnight Strikes was a fun read that explores getting stuck in a time loop and what one girl would do to save everyone and get out of that time loop. I’d definitely recommend picking it up when it comes out tomorrow! Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Book Depository | IndieBound
About the Author: Zeba Shahnaz writes fantasy full of political intrigue, twisted romance, and a healthy dose of existential angst. A proud Pakistani-American, she translated her love of storytelling into a graduate degree analyzing national identity, culture, and cinema in South Asia. She grew up in New Jersey, which she has yet to fully escape (though not because of a time loop). MIDNIGHT STRIKES is her debut novel. Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
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