Ashley Winstead

Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

Lindsay

Laws, religion, civil society  - they were just veneers, constructions put in place by the powerful to tame us animals, impose control. Over so many years we'd forgotten, treating the constructions like they were part of nature. But nature doesn't know good or evil. Allnature knows is survival. How terrifying and freeing that right and wrong aren't laws in stone but navigational instincts, like the kind of instinct a swallow feels for its place in a murmuration, like what guides geese north on a dark and starlets night.

"Who cares about their paper-thin morals and self-serving laws? My chest expands as I breathe deeply. What I'm about to say is my mightiest rebellion yet. The kings get to make the rules, but that doesn't make them right. All your life they've treated you like something unnatural and outside them. You know why my father is so powerful? Not because he's wise or good. Because he has the ability to point to someone and cast them out of the Kingdom of heaven." 

Cast them out of goodness, out of community. that's how he'd gotten his start, after all. The foundation of his power was fear and exclusion, not holiness.

 "Why should we have to love and obey a world that doesn't love us back?" My voice rises above the pounding rain. "Renard treated me like I was less than a person when he tried to rape me. And all those men told you that you were less than every time they abused you. To them, we're not people the way they are. We’re lower creatures. Animals. Beasts. You know what I say to that? Okay, then! I'm done trying to change their minds." I swallow past the lump in my throat. "Twenty-three years of trying to persuade them, to make them love us, has gotten us nowhere. I accept it - we're not human. So why should we be bound by human laws?"

"Who would defend us if we didn't defend ourselves? Who would've ever stopped Fred and Herman and Renard if not you? Your father, if not me? Their rules don't apply to us, Ever. We didn't ask for it, we didn't want it, but they forced us to become a law onto ourselves."

Then, like a damn cracking, the grief poured out. I sank to the floor and cried so hard it felt like I was breaking myself in half. and still, I couldn't get my body to express the true fullness of my grief. I was the architect of my own misery. no amount of sobbing was equal to the pain.

You're the queen of walking on eggshells. That's why you've always been so quiet. But you're not walking on them with me. You feel safe enough to get mad.

It was amazing how embodied obedience was. Amazing how, even though sometimes I thought I hated my parents, their commandments still wormed their way so deep into my subconscious that obeying them was more muscle memory than choice. That had to be the worst kind of prison - the one whose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.

But joys are few and far between in this life, so I can hardly bring myself to feel guilty.

Eventually the tall, skinny pines give way to a small clearing, and in the middle is a tree that towers above the others. It reaches out with a hundred snaking arms, some of them bent low to the ground. We call it the Medusa, because long ago, Everett and I decided we would give our love to villains. We know all too easy it is to become one when you're misunderstood. Our love is a corrective measure.

I wasn't my parents' kind of girl, not on the inside, but I wasn't anyone else's, either.

If you enjoyed You Shouldn’t Have Come Here by Jeneva Rose, then you oughta give this a try. 

This turned out to be much better than I thought it would be.  I do question some of the moral choices of the characters.  These (to me) choices seem to be wrong, but they are appearing more and more in fiction.  I do not know if it is because younger generations see things differently, or if the choice is part of the twists in the story.  In any case, I enjoyed this book.

shellybn

I wanted more! Towards the end, I was dying to know what was going to happen. The ending was exactly what this book needed. 

Amanda 

André Silva

** spoiler alert **
           "Nothing says endless love     like capital murder." - Jax Teller (Sons of Anarchy)

So much potential sadly a majority of it was left unrealized. The dual time line was interesting but as the story progressed I found the past more enjoyable. Lastly, Ruth was an interesting character but by the end hadn’t really changed all that much in my opinion. 

tatiana ✧˖°

if i took a shot every time there was a twilight reference, i'd be completely passed out by the end of the book

lucy

The conversation with the author hit more than the book did.

This book is excellent. It reminded me a lot of The End of the F***ing World on Netflix. I just wish they’d gotten to take more of those bastards down with them! 

Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

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