Book Review: Almost Midnight by Rainbow Rowell

SYNOPSIS

Almost Midnight by Rainbow Rowell is a beautiful gift edition containing two wintery short stories. decorated throughout for the first time with gorgeous black and white illustrations by Simini Blocker.

Midnights is the story of Noel and Mags, who meet at the same New Year's Eve party every year and fall a little more in love each time . . .
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Kindred Spirits is about Elena, who decides to queue to see the new Star Wars movie and meets Gabe, a fellow fan.

Synopsis from Chapters.Indigo.ca

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PERSONAL REVIEW

I adore Rainbow Rowell and have to remind myself to be more objective when reading her work, but it’s difficult because she always seems to write books that I absolutely love! I read this book a while back, but waited to post it until now because the stories seemed very seasonally appropriate – with the new Star Wars moving coming out and New Year’s around the corner, this book really hit home on two fronts for me! Because this book is actually two short stories, I’m going to give a quick review of each story, but my final rating is based on the book as a whole.
 
Personal Thoughts:

• Midnights: I thought this was an adorable story and completely fell in line with this time of year! My favourite thing about Rainbow Rowell is that she always creates incredibly relatable characters; although I can’t say that I’m like Noel or Mags, I really felt like I knew them, which is impressive since this story is pretty short. I loved how it covers years of the character’s lives, always picking up on New Year’s Eve. I felt like we really get to know Noel and Mags and I was anxious as I read about their relationship changing. Stop kissing other girls Noel!! This was such a fun and easy read and I was incredibly happy with the ending.

 

• Kindred Spirits: I’m not a Star Wars fan by any means, but always end up watching it because my husband is a huge fan. (I also recently read and reviewed Alex Bracken’s Star Wars book which you can read here). Because I didn’t watch them as a kid, I’m definitely a bigger fan of the new movies then the old ones, so I really loved reading Elena’s POV about how she got into them and why she’s never seen episodes 1-3. I’m so impressed with how Rowell makes me fall in love with characters, even in a short story, and completely pulls on my heart strings when she brings in characters like Gabe – watching his relationship with Elena over their 3 day line up was awesome and made me smile the whole time.

 
I think it’s clear that I loved both these short stories. Although I always want to read more about these characters, I sadly had to accept that these were short stories and that my time with Noel, Mags, Elena, and Gabe had come to an end. But that just means that I’ll probably re-read these a few more times! These short stories were wonderful, from the way we get to know the characters to the very adorable storylines in both tales. I had a great time reading this and would highly recommend this, and all other Rowell books, to everyone. 

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FINAL REVIEW: 5/5