Review: Under the Midnight Sky by Anna Romer

Australian author Anna Romer is in fine form with her latest release Under the Midnight Sky. A romantic tale with a mystery at its core and some fine gothic elements, it tells the story of Abby, a journalist, who is haunted by the abduction and murder of her childhood friend many years before. Returning to the small town where she grew up, she finds an injured young woman on the side of the road, but when she summons help, the girl disappears. Was it in her imagination, or is it possible that there is something darker afoot? Abby barely has time to digest the idea when chance leads her to Ravenswood, an old country house and its new owner, Tom, a reclusive man who has carved out a career writing crime novels. When Abby discovers a hidden room in Ravenswood and a page of a diary written by a young woman who went missing with her sister many years before, she realises that there may be something much darker afoot. And what is the connection between the two sisters who vanished in the 1940s and the many young women who have vanished from the area since.

I know I said this about Romer's previous novel, Beyond the Orchard, but I do think that this is the authors best work yet. (In other words, this one is even better than Beyond the Orchard.) The mystery is quite intriguing and reminded me of two of my favourite gothic novels, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews, though the author most certainly puts her own spin on things. There is also a lot of romance in there, and a lovely depiction of small town Australian life. The novel itself is written in a way that is pleasing and easy to read and I found myself getting lost in this story on several occasions. 

Highly recommended.

This book was read as part of the Aussie Author Challenge 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean...
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu...
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A...
Read more