Sharing protagonist duty with Sophie is Mouth, a jaded smuggler from an otherwise extinct nomadic people called the Citizens. Read more: Best New Speculative Fiction Young Adult Books Toxic rainstorms have been trashing our crops, and the aquifers are getting polluted or drained. “‘The sea is fished out, meteor quarries coming up empty, textile factories at half capacity. “‘It’s all up for grabs,'” one single-minded Argelan character muses, giving a broad strokes example of the human perspective. Telepathic and connected to their native planet in ways humanity doesn’t value, the Gelet are the weirdest, and most hopepunk part of the entire novel, and directly tied to the book’s exploration of climate change. Sophie’s path forward (and, ultimately, away from Bianca) is informed by her role as a human ambassador into January’s dark, cold night-side, and the aliens who live there-telepathic, collectively-minded creatures known by the humans as “crocodiles,” because of their vague resemblance to the Earth animal, but whom Sophie calls Gelet after one saves her life when she is cast out of Xiosphant for a minor crime she did not commit. Read more: Best New Science Fiction Books That struggle, part of Sophie’s larger journey to live with her trauma and find hope in an unjust world, is infinitely relatable-tragic, brave, and so very human. “I need to learn to belong to other people the way everyone seems to,” Sophie tries to coach herself at one point, “with one hand in the wind.” Sophie spends the entire book trying to escape the glamorous gravity of Bianca.
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Sophie and Bianca’s complex and toxic dynamic, in which Bianca uses Sophie’s trauma as political capital and Sophie must learn the agony of putting up necessary personal boundaries. In City in the Middle of the Night, Anders examines the inextricability of the personal and the political.
While there, she meets and falls for upper-class Bianca, an aspiring revolutionary who is more interested in what rebellion says about her than in how it might change the world. On January, humans live in one of two declining cities (mostly) situated in the light: The rigid, oppressive Xiosphant, where people say things like “Heed the chimes, know your way,” and the more laissez faire Argelo, run by nine family-affiliated gangs, keeping the city in a perpetual cycle of violence.īoth cities have devastating class systems, hierarchies that continue to be informed by the dominant cultures of the generation ship that first brought humanity to January. In Xiosphant, we meet POV character Sophie, a young woman from the working class side of town studying at the city’s university.
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