This was a beautiful fun read, full of magic, romance and feminism. I found the world building and magic well developed and intriguing, i loved the bargaining season and series of balls. The characters were well developed and complex I especially love Nadi - a spirit of luck - who is such a joy whenever on page. I thought the end was a little rushed and convenient, and some of the feminism was a little too on the nose. But overall this was thoroughly enjoyable.

Thank you @netgalley and @erewhonbooks for the arc! This title was released October 13, 2020.

This novel completely enchanted me! I really felt for Beatrice and was so invested in her storyline. I struggled deciding what she should do as much as she did! This story tackled women’s rights in a fantasy setting seamlessly. I loved how political it was and how Polk was able to make you fall in love with Ianthe but root for Beatrice’s freedom. I wasn’t sure how it was going to end! I was stressing and devoured the book in one day. The pacing was perfect and the end had me satisfied. I highly recommend!

Another book that I just feel very in the middle about. It wasn't the worst, but it wasn't the best either. I was initially drawn in by the beautiful cover and intrigued by the synopsis. Magic, far off worlds, fun with demons, and a little bit of romance—what's not to love?

Unfortunately, too much. But I'll get to that in a second. First, some things I did enjoy:

- Nadi was by far the best part of this book. They are perfectly snarky and mischievous.
- An interesting, expansive world with a lot to explore and a unique magic system
- A take on feminism and standing up for the rights women deserve

Now, onto everything else.

The characters for me were kind of flat. I didn't really feel attached to Beatrice in any sound way. She was at times a little too whiny and selfish. Other than that, I can't say she had much personality. Her relationship with Ianthe, too, was confusing, because it was rather difficult to figure out why they were falling in love in the first place. Really, I think I enjoyed her friendship with Ianthe's sister Ysbeta more.

The world, while expansive and for the most part enjoyable, was also confusing at times. It was hard to get the hang of. There was sometimes too much world-building and it could feel a little info-dumpy. The magic system seemed pretty interesting, though, and I wish I could have gotten a better understanding for it.

The plot also fell flat for me. There were times that were fun and exciting, but then it would be followed by slow and boring parts. I kind of wish the stakes had been higher throughout. I didn't really feel the urgency or the necessity of everything Beatrice did.

All in all, this book held my attention for the most part, but I can't say it was my favorite read. I would 100% read more about Nadi, though.

ARC Review: Received for free via Netgalley for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Thank you for letting me review this title.

I liked this book, it was quite interesting and had a good time reading it, even though the end was a bit rushed for me.

Beatrice Clayborn has a problem. In a world where sorceresses are valued for their womb instead of their magic, she's in the middle of Bargaining Season. She wants out. She has a Plan, but it involves finding a Greater Spirit and convincing her father she's worth more as a spinster mage instead of a bride. But when she finds the right grimoire she needs, it's ripped from her hands by two of the most wealthy people in the country: the Lavan siblings. As Beatrice becomes more involved with the siblings, her purpose becomes less clear. Which path will she choose?

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

This was amazing and relevant and I loved it!

She coated her grin with sugar and arsenic.


Look, I love CL Polk and I love her fantasy of manners. I love how she ties relevant topics into her fantastical works—in this case, the deferment of women's power and opportunity in favor of their reproductivity, all wrapped up in respectability politics.

The entire story reads like a horror novel instead of a fantasy one, because the debutantes are being brought to market for wealthy husbands and essentially sold for their magical bloodlines. Once wed, the women are literally shackled and cut off from their power, as the potential for a demon to enter their fetus is too strong to counter. While collared, the women are unable to practice magic, and are left to live a colorless life of child-rearing. Magic is only available once they are past child-rearing age or their husbands have died—and the keys to the collar are wielded by their powerful, magical husbands.

While the story focuses solely on the upper class, there are some women who were mentioned, and how they managed to break free of the confines of society.

He had taken a generous dowry and learned that the way to have a small fortune from speculation and investment was to start with a large one.


The story, however, focuses on upper class Beatrice, whose upper class and disowned mother married down for love. Beatrice's father gets them into hot water after cash grab after cash grab goes (predictably) horribly awry, leaving her pending marriage to whoever the one thing that'll sink or swim the family, especially as Dear Old Dad put the family even more in debt trying to ensure Beatrice has what she needs to get up to par.

Anywho, I did like the economics of the situation and how it paralleled to 19th century England, and how much of the politics of biology and power were played out within society. And the turning of men's clubs into chapter houses of magic! Brilliant! I also really enjoyed reading about the Llanderlis (sp??), a country that seemed loosely based on India. And I loved the Lavan siblings, although naive love-struck Ianthe was a little much for me. I much preferred his sister, Ysbeta, who was ace and ambitious and fantastic!

And I loved Beatrice, who was naive and young but knew what she wanted until she was faced with other possibilities. She was put between a rock and a hard place and had to navigate her way through, although luckily she made some friends and strategic alliances along the way. And, of course, I loved Nadi, the lesser spirit. She was annoying at first, but damn she grew on me. #TeamNadi.

So, strong points, which overshadowed all other flaws in this book:

-The world-building.
-The sacrificing of potential/power in favor of reproduction
-The skewering of the patriarchy
-Beatrice, who did a lot of growing and adulting
-Fierce Ysbeta
-Beatrice's mom
-The economic layout of the world (orchid bust! shipping! industry! infrastructure!)
-Nadi!!!!!!!

The flaw:
-The instalove (it grew on me, but I kept wondering what Ianthe saw?)

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review

I started this arc because it has a regency-inspired fantasy setting but it offers much more than that.

I am surprised to see some people dislike the writing style but I found it smooth and beautiful. The characters aren't one-dimensional and their motives make a lot of sense. The stakes throughout the story are high for everyone else. And I liked how it dealt with mostly feminist issues in a way that fit the setting and did not read like a 21st century character with 21st century notions were put in the novel. In fact historical details made this fantasy setting all the more enchanting and convincing.

I loved reading about a powerful, more affluent country that is not made of white people and the dynamics between different countries and how marriage played an essential role for all the women in the novel.

As for the romance, it was delightful and at times almost star-crossed. Love was not an all justifying factor nor did it solve all the characters' problems. I loved reading about Ysbeta and her lack of romantic attachment to everyone as much as the relationship of Beatrice and Ianthe.

I recieved this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In a way I liked this book a lot, but I didn't like the ending very much, I think I expected something else.

I really liked the characters and they are all different with their own lives, dreams and problems.

I was extremely desperate for the machismo in this book, women can't do anything and men think they are stupid and with the only goal in life to be mothers. I hated them so much.

Beatrice is a very strong character and I really admire her! She is always behind her dreams without forgetting her family, although at one point she doubts about X person, she never forgets her goal and will always fight for them.

This book is full of magic, powerful women and how you must always fight for your dreams no matter what difficulties lie ahead.

Of course, I lacked much more development in the world, that part was very poor.

Thank you to netgalley.co.uk for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I thought the book showed a lot of promise, the blurb made it sound very interesting. But I felt it was a bit all over the place, I couldn’t understand certain aspects of the book such as the main romance, I thought it was rushed and it made the whole thing quite unbelievable for me.

Although the premise is great (magic, socioeconomic equality, patriarchy), the plot lost its focus to instalove between the MCs. The romance was too haphazard for me. The world building felt like a historical romance, instead of fantasy. The main character of Beatrice felt too flat. However, I loved the summoned spirit, Nadi.

Thank you Netgalley for an eArc of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I have enjoyed this book very much. This is a fantasy book about a patriarchal world where women, despite being powerful sorceresses, are only useful for their reproductive ability and their role as mothers and wives. The main character, Beatrice, does not agree with the set order and she rebels. She does not want to marry, and lose her powers. She dreams with being a powerful mage bound to a higher spirit, same as the men in her world.
The story takes place during Bargaining season – a short period of time when eligible young men look for wives. Beatrice attends this as her family is struggling financially and her marriage to a rich and powerful men would ensure stability and prestige to for her family, but most of all for her younger sister, Harrier. While tracking down a powerful grimoire she meets Ysbeta and Iante Lavan – rich and powerful siblings. From this moment one their history is strongly interlinked.
I have enjoyed the world building, the magic system, most of the characters and the plot. I did find the love interests in this book appeared too quickly, almost always love at first sight, and some of the characters seemed to lack depth and appear quite childish and petulant at times.

Thank you Net Galley and Erehwon Books for allowing me to have a chance to read this in exchange for an honest review!

Overall, I'm giving this book a 3.5 stars out of 5. It's a great read for young readers out there.
FULL REVIEW ON MY BLOG

THEME

What I loved was how the book focused on how this young woman felt. Women have hopes and dreams yet society keeps on telling us that you should be content with having a husband and children. Women have feelings and it is their right as well to choose who they want to be with. Women are not items that you can buy or dispose of. Women are people with feelings and dreams, not robots or slaves or products.

CHARACTERS

To be honest, I really was pissed at Beatrice and Ysbeta. These are two girls who feel like they know everything and can do everything. They are stubborn without really thinking things through or planning well. Even Ianthe did not catch my attention much. The one character that caught my attention was Nadi. Nadi isn't even a person. he spirit had a great character arc more obvious than those of the main characters for me. There really was no character antagonist here but it was really a struggle between Beatrice vs. the system.

SETTING

Here's where I kind of had a problem. I felt that the world building wasn't enough for me. I had a difficult time trying to imagine the world they had. I just thought of it as Pride & Prejudice meets automatons meets magic. I think the magic system was hard to understand. I still have many questions such as "why do they have to house spirits in their bodies?" sort of questions. Maybe it wasn't explained too much in depth.

RECOMMENDATIONS

I'd recommend this more for girls of ages 12 to 17 years old. This book will probably help them open their eyes more and know what they want against what people will tell them.

PS. Please fix some parts. I think some parts have punctuation errors and there was a part where it was written that 1 character said it but I think it really wasn't the character who said it but Beatrice who said it. It was a dialogue portion. Thank you!

Overall this was an enjoyable read. I do wish that there was more to the story once Ysbeta had gotten her parents to understand her reasoning. There were a few places where the story felt rushed. I did appreciate that Beatrice and Ianthe found a way to be together as equals.

Reviewed in Shelf Awareness for Readers:

In The Midnight Bargain, C.L. Polk (Witchmark) uses the imagined world of Chasland (a land "long on wealth and short on social progress") and classic tropes of many Regency romance novels to deliver a timely message about social and gender justice. Beatrice Clayborn is the powerful eldest daughter of a noble family whose coffers have run dry. Her magic runs deep and strong, though it is valuable to her family only insofar as it can secure her a wealthy husband and produce for him magical heirs. Beatrice longs for something more than marriage to a man of her father's choosing, and has identified a powerful grimoire that can help her build the world she wants. Her pursuit of the book leads her to an unexpected friendship with another sorceress--and a burgeoning love for her new friend's brother.

Over the course of The Midnight Bargain, Beatrice comes into her power--of both the magical and metaphorical varieties--forcing those around her to face uncomfortable truths about the status quo, who it benefits and at what cost. "The current system lays all of the restriction, all the responsibility, and all of the burden on sorceresses," she explains. "For [men], the system isn't broken, so why look for a solution?" This struggle to find a resolution that lessens the patriarchal burden placed on women's shoulders feels as relevant in the real world as it does in Polk's expertly imagined one. The Midnight Bargain is a feminist fantasy novel that is both charming and important, further cementing Polk's place as a powerful voice in the genre whose work exposes the broken systems in the real world. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Discover: This feminist fantasy novel uses classic romance tropes to deliver a timely message on social and gender justice.

An entertaining fantasy-of-manners that entangles with gender politics, The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk features battles fought not with swords, but wit and calculated politeness. Every word you say could smear your reputation, every act you commit against the wrong person could destroy your family's social standing.

I enjoyed the way Polk handled gender politics in this book. Higher magic is forbidden to married women in order to protect their unborn children from being corrupted by wily spirits. Beatrice Clayborn, however, is less interested in getting married than exploring her natural affinity for magic, but her family is on the brink of financial ruin, and her marrying a wealthy man is the only way to save them. The solution to all her problems appears in the form of Ianthe Lavan, a man perfect in every plausible way: handsome, ridiculously rich, kind—and more importantly, he's supportive of her pursuit of magic, vowing to never oppress her the way other men in her country do.

But as Polk explores in this book, that's not enough. A supportive husband does not cure a sexist society, nor does Beatrice having her own private happy ending mean other women will fare so fortunately. The book became a page-tuner for me in the latter half, when the choices Beatrice made for her life start unfolding in dramatic ways.

Various other things I liked:
-the frequently reiterated issue of Beatrice's own individual desires clashing with her duty to her family and their collective desires. Polk explores it with a depth I don't see so frequently nowadays from Western authors.
-Nadi, Beatrice's cheeky and impulsive spirit friend who loves her and wants to explore the world.
-Polk's prose—I felt it fit the setting well, and was emotionally evocative. Although it occasionally veered towards overly twee, I still prefer this sort of distinctive voice over a bland, generic style.
-the easy integration of POCs in the setting. An issue I find with books in this genre (Regency-inspired settings) is that sometimes they default to the "White England is the superior, civilised nation, all other skin colours are inferior and shall either be discussed in vague stereotypes, or simply ignored" mentality. Not so here! There's a black-coded nation featuring prominently in the book, with no commonly seen racist tropes applied to them, and characters hailing from there are far from bland stereotypes.
-the epilogue! I loved the stunt Beatrice pulled. Bamboozling sexists until the very end, what a champ.

Would recommend this book to anyone into fantasy-of-manners and gender politics.

☘️

*Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book for review, all opinions are my own*

I'm completely in love with this book.
It's perfect I can't think of something I didn't like. The mixture of historical romance with magic was incredible, the author managed to bring the best of both worlds in dances, parties, dresses, weddings all mixed with magic, power, grimoires, spirits, and rituals.
But more than that this book is a slap in the face that makes us understand what women go through.
The author managed to bring to a fantastical world all the dilemmas and obstacles that women face, she managed to bring very important reflections to be discussed, she also created amazing women characters all in her wonderful and fearless way.
Also gave me the best love interest (Ianthe) ever written.
This a book about love, friendship, fight for what you want, going against society and expectations, in the end for me was a book about hope and strong women.
I highly recommend this book to everyone, you need to read and fall in love and be enchanted and be moved by this book with the story and these characters.
There is not one bad thing about this book it's one of my favorites, a book that I will definitely reread and always recommend to everyone.
I think that nothing I write in this review will do this book justice so I just ask you to read it!

The Midnight Bargain was not what I anticipated. It was more of a Regency-era romance with a little bit of fantasy thrown in. From the description of the book, I thought the story would focus more on women’s rights and have an outstandingly strong female main character but that is not truly the case. Beatrice dreams of being a full-fledged Magnus, however, her family is reliant on her to marry well in order to dissolve the family’s debt. The idea of Beatrice forging her own path against her family’s wishes and society’s rules instills that this story will portray women as strong and independent. But then Beatrice almost instantly falls in love with Ianthe. This book would definitely appeal more to romance lovers than those looking for fantasy.

fantasy books either turn me on or off, this was an ON! Fun ride and will hit the lists hard. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher!

The Midnight Bargain is a book I wanted to like more than I did. There's a lot here to like: in particular, I found the worldbuilding subtly effective and the magic system very neat. The blend of regency/fantasy genre didn't always work for me but I did always find it interesting. A possibly weird highlight but something which really stood out to me is the way that love interest Ianthe and his sister Ysbeta were consistently described in terms of both their brownness and their beauty. I really liked this; I think it was done very well, and it's something we don't see enough. I think I liked the general thesis of the book, which is about gendered power and oppression, but didn't like how it was dealt with. Throughout the book, Beatrice continually talks about how little she wants to be collared and cut off from her magic, but she keeps trying to net herself a husband who will do this to her anyway. As one of my friends put it, it's difficult not to ask why Beatrice did not simply run away with Ysbeta to become magic lesbian pirates together in the first place. The reasoning used in the book is something something money big debt for Beatrice's bargaining season, she can't leave her family in the lurch, but when you have a literal luck spirit on your side who is demonstrably excellent at winning money for you at gambling and investments I do feel like there is a solution there also. I think my main beef with this book is an overly strict adherence to a false dichotomy whereby Beatrice simply must give up either her magic or everyone she cares about, and this conflict she struggled with so earnestly never rang true for me.

I also had another, smaller beef with the romance. Which is unfortunate because I am so easy to please, I am 100% that brainless moron who just loves when people love each other! But Beatrice falls extremely in love with Ianthe quite early on in the book and then spends a lot of time, I guess, convincing him to take her seriously? Which doesn't seem like a very romantic activity to me, ymmv etc. etc. Ianthe says a lot of vaguely progressive-sounding things like "I wish it didn't have to be this way" but then seems basically content to follow this up with "but what can you do, right?" (I am making this specific quote up, this is just his vibe). He finds Beatrice and Ysbeta practicing magic together and forbids them to keep doing it, and he basically only deviates from this party line at the final conflict of the book when events absolutely demand it. I don't know if I love that, really!

Nevertheless, I think this is a fun, likeable read. I took a fairly long break in the middle of the book and when I returned to it I was able to zoom through the rest in an evening. Thank you to NetGalley & Erewhon books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was a great historical fantasy story. I loved the setting, the romance, the author was able to capture my attention and keep me invested throughout. I would highly recommend this to anyone!

La época de la regencia en el Reino Unido es un imán que atrae inexorablemente a muchos autores fantásticos, fascinados por el lujo y las costumbres de la época, que se afanan por reflejar en sus libros, de una forma más o menos disimulada. Es cierto que C.L. Polk inventa todo un nuevo mundo, pero el hecho de que las familias más poderosas oferten a sus hijas solteras en una especie de pasarela de alta costura para buscar el mejor postor, que es la clave de The Midnight Bargain, no hace sino explicitar la inspiración de sus orígenes.


Cuando afrontamos la lectura de esta novela, lo que ofrece está claro. Modales cortesanos mezclados con intrigas, fortunas que han caído en desgracia buscando una inyección económica que las salve del desastre mediante una buena dote, conexiones entre compañías en búsqueda del mayor beneficio y todo eso aderezado con la presencia de magia, no muy bien explicada desde un principio pero siempre presente.

Quizá lo que hace destacar algo la novela de Polk, es el feminismo imbuido en las protagonistas, que no desean renunciar a su magia al casarse por la necesidad de proteger a sus futuros hijos de la posesión de los entes mágicos. Pero no es un feminismo beligerante como en The Once and Future Witches si no más bien una serie de intenciones para evitar este futuro en particular, sin generalizar al resto de las mujeres. La más que típica dualidad entre el amor y el deber, pero en este caso sin poder compaginar la pasión por la magia con las obligaciones familiares una vez alcanzada la mayoría de edad.

En este sentido, el libro de Polk se mueve por senderos bastante conocidos y he de reconocer que en ocasiones algo tediosos. No porque esté mal escrito, si no porque es demasiado previsible el desarrollo de los acontecimientos. Es cierto que el ritmo de la novela va mejorando conforme van pasando los capítulos y hay algunos momentos especialmente reivindicativos, pero no hay ningún instante especialmente rupturista con la situación anterior y muchas veces el desarrollo de la historia depende de la buena voluntad del amado de la protagonista, porque no todos los hombres son iguales.

The Midnight Bargain es una novela entretenida y más que correcta, con una ambientación cuidad y de lectura agradable, que no viene a revolucionar el género pero que tampoco supondrá una decepción para el lector que se acerque a ella sabiendo lo que se va a encontrar.