The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Two young girls, Sophie and Bianca, live on a planet which is tidally locked to its sun. One side is always toward the sun and is extremely hot; another is always away from the sun and it is very cold. Life is possible only on a narrow strip between those sides. A ”Mothership” brought human colonists to the planet centuries ago and established a colony. There had been some unrest and even apparent ethnic cleansing during the generations long journey. The contact with the Mothership has been lost and technology is slowly failing as weather patterns grow worse.

Sophie is from a poor family and managed to get to university by sheer will and brilliance. Bianca is a privileged, rich, beautiful and popular girl who was always destined to go to the best of schools. Sophie has fallen desperately in love with Bianca, and when Bianca does something which could cause severe punishment, just for kicks, Sophie takes the blame. Police pick her up, and just toss her over the wall on the dark side to die. As she is freezing to death she sees a ”crocodile”, a huge vicious beast that lives in the cold, sometimes kills people and are usually killed on sight. As she has nothing to lose and is dying anyway she succumbs to the beast. It turns out that the ”beast” is an intelligent being who belongs to a species which communicates by sharing their memories and saves Sophie. The crocodiles have a vast city under the ice on the cold side, and they are interested in forming relations with humans. Sophie returns to city and lives more or less underground, fearing the police. She eventually establishes contact with Bianca and they together go to the another town on the planet with some smugglers. Sophie has plans for mutiny and changing the ways of her home town.

The setting was interesting, but I don’t think that the weather would work like that. I would think that the huge temperature difference would cause non-ending cyclone level winds. The aliens were also well described and fascinating. The human characters, though, were irritating and far too much time was spent on Sophie's pining for Bianca, when it was very soon very obvious that Bianca was just using Sophie, and demanded trust and love when she herself had none to give. But love is apparently very blind. The book ended just when things got interesting and the events at the end happened very fast and mostly off screen. Maybe a few dozen pages Sophies dreaming of Bianca could have been cut and the fairly open ending expanded a bit. The writing itself was pretty good, and there were interesting ideas, but there were parts of the book which were a struggle to get through especially about half-way. It will not be one of my first choices in the voting.


366 pp.