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sunflower_fantasy 's review for:
Midnight Robber
by Nalo Hopkinson
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Rounded up from 4.5.
A stunning fantasy with a heart-wrenching plot, unforgivable complex characters, and exciting worlds.
In Midnight Robber, Hopkinson’s world-building dances within the colours and vibrancies of Caribbean carnivals/mas. An amalgamation of Caribbean cultures, it beautifully captures the spirit and soul of the islands through its imagination of a galaxy of planets beyond our own.
Told through the perspective of young and determined Tan-Tan who is forced to leave her home with her corrupt, self-absorbed father, the novel explores themes such as familial love, loss and trauma, power and control, and punishment and retribution.
Hopkinson plays with narration, weaving together perspectives drawn from Tan-Tan’s reality, but also storytelling, myth, and folklore. She often leaves us to decipher what’s true, and what’s fabulation. Once again, leaning into the rhetoric skill of Caribbean storytelling.
She is a master of character. Painfully, her characters can’t be slotted into a binary of good or bad. They are people that have evil actions, or are bad/good at one time, but not others.
There are elements to the story that I would have liked developed even further, such as AI, the douens’ background and whether there’s other creatures, and how some human infrastructure was developed so quickly. But at the same time, Tan-Tan is ignorant to a lot of these questions, and thus so are we, the readers.
I make peace with knowing only what I need to know, and following Tan-Tan’s coming-of-age story in these worlds.
I would definitely read again
A stunning fantasy with a heart-wrenching plot, unforgivable complex characters, and exciting worlds.
In Midnight Robber, Hopkinson’s world-building dances within the colours and vibrancies of Caribbean carnivals/mas. An amalgamation of Caribbean cultures, it beautifully captures the spirit and soul of the islands through its imagination of a galaxy of planets beyond our own.
Told through the perspective of young and determined Tan-Tan who is forced to leave her home with her corrupt, self-absorbed father, the novel explores themes such as familial love, loss and trauma, power and control, and punishment and retribution.
Hopkinson plays with narration, weaving together perspectives drawn from Tan-Tan’s reality, but also storytelling, myth, and folklore. She often leaves us to decipher what’s true, and what’s fabulation. Once again, leaning into the rhetoric skill of Caribbean storytelling.
She is a master of character. Painfully, her characters can’t be slotted into a binary of good or bad. They are people that have evil actions, or are bad/good at one time, but not others.
There are elements to the story that I would have liked developed even further, such as AI, the douens’ background and whether there’s other creatures, and how some human infrastructure was developed so quickly. But at the same time, Tan-Tan is ignorant to a lot of these questions, and thus so are we, the readers.
I make peace with knowing only what I need to know, and following Tan-Tan’s coming-of-age story in these worlds.
I would definitely read again