This book is dark, spooky, and entrancing. I could not put it down; I had to know what was going to happen. If you're a fan of Catherine House or Jane Eyre, you'll like this book. This is definitely more on the horror side of gothic storytelling and not for the faint of heart.

Orabella expects to be a spinster; she has no prospects in life. When Elias shows up asking for her hand and a rushed marriage, Orabella thinks she's in a fairytale. When they arrive at Elias's estate, Orabella quickly realizes she's not in a fairytale. The manor house is in a state of decay and disrepair. At first, Orabella thinks it just needs a woman's touch, but she is soon startled to learn that the house is so damaged she cannot leave her room alone and must be locked in at night. What follows is a dark twisted story that you just can't put down.

I loved the themes of this book so much. I thought it was beautiful and dark at the same time. I'm honestly excited to see what else this author writes because of how much I couldn't put this book down. Orabella was just an orphan trying to make the best of her life; she sees an opportunity to be way more than she ever thought, and she takes it. The choice brings her into a decaying mansion where she has no allies and isn't sure she can trust her husband. Plus, she keeps losing time and is always told to drink her tea or wine. As the reader, you can see the red flags but can't stop her from going down the path.

There were two things that kept this from being a 5-star read for me. The first was there were several glaring grammatical errors and any time I have to leave the world of the story to reread lines, I get frustrated. The second was the big reveal. I thought there could have been more of Orabella learning about the family's history to make the reveal and 3rd act more sinister. It felt a little too hurried for me.

Overall, this was an excellent horror debut, and I can't wait to see what the author writes next.

Thanks to NetGalley and Amistad Publishing for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

This is a gothic and fairytale inspired novel that follows Orabella into a surprise marriage in a house of horrors, full of vivid imagery that is frankly disturbing. Coles has created a haunting world within this book that was incredibly engrossing. I often felt like I was right alongside Orabella in her confusion about everything happening, and I think that ultimately added to the overall effect.

This book is full of characters as interesting as they are unsettling, and I wanted to know more but the not knowing is what sells it. Reading this book felt like running down a road that you know drops into a cliff but you don’t know when. You always feel like there’s something coming, but never get to be quite prepared for what ends up happening. I think that it does work in this novel, but it did make some sections a bit challenging to get through.

I really enjoyed Orabella as our protagonist, and I was always rooting for her. The way that she was so often torn between such conflicting emotions felt so raw, and she really felt fully realized to me as I was reading, as though she could have walked right off the page. Elias, her counterpart, was another interesting character and I love the way that we are kept guessing about him through the entirety of the novel. Korringhill felt like another character all on its own, and I did enjoy the way that Coles achieved through such vivid descriptions.

Overall, I did really enjoy this one but I did feel a bit lost at times. While it works in the big picture, it made the experience of reading it a bit perplexing. 4⭐️

After a whirlwind marriage to a man she scarcely knows, our MC Orabella is spirited back to her husband's ancestral home. She finds the estate's manor house in a state of dereliction, occupied by a skeleton crew of suspiciously reticent staff and her new relatives, who are creepy in the extreme.

The author created a perfectly delicious sort of unnamable dread that gradually built up as I progressed through this story. The first half of the book feels classically Gothic, with dark labyrinthine corridors and unsettling noises in the night, terrible secrets which the house hints at but refuses to divulge. Shades of Jane Eyre for certain.

For me, though, I noticed a turning point around Orabella's new sister-in-law's horrific "episode". after which we start to veer into Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper territory.

Now I LOVE an unreliable narrator. I really do. But the period between Orabella's increasing confusion and the climax of the book needs condensing and tightening up. Some amount internal monologue is definitely necessary to illustrate the degradation of her state of mind, but there is simply too much. I was dangerously close to skimming paragraphs.

Overall, still certainly worth a read!

This entire book was a delicious fever dream. It was the perfect blend of mystery and fantasy. The story drew me in immediately and it was impossible to guess how the story would end.

I usually don't care if people dislike books that I love. But reading the reviews on this book were making me SALTY. If you are turned off by traditional gothic themes or don't understand a story, that is a YOU problem. This book should have a way higher rating, but unfortunately seems to be missing its target audience.

This book was precisely my *cup of tea* :P

Whimsical yet morbid gothic fairytale on a bad mushroom trip.

The tension and looming dread throughout this whole tale had me swallowing this story right up.

I loved the writing as well. I legitimately felt like I was lost in Orabella's shimmering fairytale world.

Romantic, repulsive, gorgeous, carnal, disorienting


PS Note to the author: who tf is Lovell?

I really wanted to love this! I did like the gothic setting and the slight haunted house vibes. I normally like a slow burn but this was a little TOO slow for me. The idea and premise of an arranged marriage of convenience was interesting and I liked where it was going. The fairy tale aspect threw me off and it was unexpected. I didn’t hate it but I’m not sure that this book was for me.

This was cool, but not what I expected. I think form the synopsis and cover, I expected something different. Not sure what exactly.

The literary world is missing gothic novels, and as someone who loves gothic novels, this book is filling a gap that is desperately needed. This book was amazing. It was a wonderful gothic novel, and it was so refreshing to see the genre, which I find is hard to find many times aside from the classics. I love how Coles followed the classic gothic rules while also putting a spin on them to make the book unique. This book was amazing, and it was something that I've been looking for, and it didn't disappoint. Coles has a true talent, and I loved the twists and turns the narrative took and seeing those characters navigate the story.

WELL DONE! I have never read a supernatural book so I was excited and anxious to see how it was going to go for me.

I am a bit of a "scary cat" so I was thinking "please don't let this be like a supernatural horror lol"

This is the part of the description that grabbed me:

supernatural undertones set in Victorian England. Vibrating with tension, richly atmospheric—haunted by ghosts, guilt, and familial bonds

With this story being in England, the FMC being biracial; it gave me glimpse of how something you think is decent to live in can turn into complete caous.

The main FMC in this story was resilient by the end of the story but what she went through had me wanting to keep turning the pages to see if she would make it.

BRAVO!

It's like a gothic fairy tale sprinkle in some hallucinations. I was confused bit i think do was Orabella.
Orabella is a biracial woman who finds herself under her uncle's care after her parents have both died. Elias shows up seeking her hand in marriage and even though he is a complete stranger, she accepts.
He seems sweet and takes her away with him to live in his mansion. Once they arrive, she meets his creepy family and then starts the strange things. She's disoriented and can't focus. She is locked in her room at night. Elias tells her not to wander through the house or she'll get lost.
This story get very confusing at times. I like the gothic vibes and Orabella is a very likeable character. The book was menacing and dark .
Overall I think the reason it was so confusing was to make you feel the disorientation that Orabella felt when she arrived at the mansion.
I really enjoyed this book!

Midnight Rooms is a gothic story about Orabella who agrees to marry a man in exchange for paying off debts. Everything seems okay at first, but something more eerie starts creeping into the narrative.


This book was a fever dream of a wild ride. I enjoy weird books so this was right up my alley. It was a slow burn of a book, but it did get too slow and kind of boring at times. Sometimes, the paragraphs were too descriptive for things that didn’t need to be described. You need to be in the mood for this type of book, but I would recommend it to anyone with an open mind and ready for something weird.


Thank you to NetGalley and Amistad for allowing me to read an early copy of Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles in exchange for my honest opinion.

Though I do believe this is very much so a gothic read , I didn’t get the horror aspect at all, With that said this book was very good and very well written. The author does a great job of drawing out the suspense in a soow even erie pace throughout the story, Though for me I felt it was maybe too slow at moments it didn’t take away from the story. Orabella is basically in her last chance of being courted and her grandfather sell her to Elise a strange man to pay off his debts. At first conversation Elisa is very kind and gentlemanly to Orabella but there is something very strange about him. Orabella agrees to marry Elise and soon after things taken an erie strange turn.

This was just an OK for me. I didn’t like the writing style. It was very descriptive and set a wonderful scene, but took awhile to get to the “haunted” aspect of the book, which just felt like a fever dream in ways. May be for some, but not for me unfortunately. Thanks NetGalley for this ARC

This is a beautifully written novel that creates an intriguing set up. Think of this book as a fever dream that makes you want to keep following the different hallways. There is a woman who is set up to be married in a transactional way then learns the new family is surreptitious. Featuring the Victorian time period and the gothic set up this book is a great read. I would recommend it to those who enjoy creepy and psych0logical twists. The ending was unpredictable for me but it did make sense. The reason I took off a star was due to the repetition. There were many times the house was redescribed or describing Orbella's drug state.

I would say 4 out of 5.

Twenty-six year old Orabella finds herself quickly whisked off to be married to Elias Blakersby. An arranged marriage seemed odd to her but Elias promised a life of her dreams as his wife. Taken to the family estate, what seems to have once been a marvelous mansion is now mostly run-down and unkempt. Very soon Orabella finds there are many secrets inside the walls of their home and through the lineage of the Blakersbys.

This one was a very very slow burn. I really enjoyed the setting of the Gothic mansion, overgrown gardens, dusty rooms. I enjoyed the time-period of mid-1800s.

About mid-way through I felt like it had become very repetitive and not much had yet happened. When things did start happening it was this odd Alice in Wonderland type storyline. I would have been fine with the weird vibes (drugged/ dreams, beasts, cannibalism, incest) if I felt they had good justification at the end but I felt like by the time I got through the repetition the ending was a bit of a let down.

I think this is a fever dream? Overall I fear the writing style wasn’t for me. I can see how others may enjoy it, but it felt too much like a bad movie to me.

I was very happy when I got the arc for this book. The comp title of Crimson Peak and the cover made me really excited to read it, but the writing and story didn’t hold up to my expectations. The entire beginning and middle was a poorly written replica of Crimson Peak. The ending was just a rush of words and unsatisfying, almost nonexistent character arcs. I wish Coles took more time to describe the characters’ depths than she did with descriptions of the environment. I’d find myself skimming through passages of furniture, wishing I was reading more about the characters instead. The sentence structure became very cramped and repetitive in most chapters, especially in the detailed passages. Every sentence had an interruption with too many breaks and commas. Everything had to be compared to anything previously mentioned. Every single action was force fed to the reader. I don’t need to know the details of Orabella spearing a piece of meat, lifting it to her mouth, placing it on her tongue, and chewing. I couldn’t understand whole paragraphs with how incomplete and confusing they read. The middle chapters were almost unreadable, which sucked because I really wanted to get to the story, but I couldn’t hear it through all the noise of bad sentences and redundancy. No plot twist was a shock because none of the elements were very new or clever. The two-sided husband, the poisoned tea, the letters, every element held no suspense or surprise because they were so obvious and previously used in Crimson Peak and the Bronte works. Orabella also just wasn’t very smart. I would get it if she dismissed the strange manor because she was blinded by love or needed an escape from her upbringing, but she didn’t seem connected to anything or anyone. No one felt connected to the story because of the writing. I didn’t care about any of the characters, so their actions weren’t shocking. With a lot of editing and some changes in the plot, I think this could have been a good book. Maybe the published version will turn out different.

I try to provide some positive commentary when giving a book review, but there wasn’t really much I enjoyed about this book. The writing was really wooden, with odd dialogue and unnecessary moments of the FMC talking to herself. When the writing wasn’t wooden, it was just weird. One woman’s complexion is compared to the underbelly of a mushroom, and there’s two whole sentences where the narrator told the audience how dark a room is because the curtains remain closed, as if we’ve never experienced the power of curtains before.

It also didn’t feel entirely original. The tale of a woman going to a decrepit house with a mostly-stranger gave me major Hacienda & Mexican Gothic feels. You have a crabby older woman alongside a nearly dead father like Mexican Gothic. Then, you have a beautiful female side character with dangerous secrets like in Hacienda. Yet, it didn’t have the same charm as those two books.

I wanted to like this book, but it felt like the Wal-Mart version of the books with similar plots that I actually adored. I was going to push through and finish the book, but then I went on Goodreads and saw the reviews. Apparently, the first half is the GOOD HALF? I was barely pushing myself through to the 50% mark because books typically pick up at that point, but reading reviews that said the opposite happened made this an instant DNF.

It has a pretty book cover though!

A dark/gothic story meets a fairy tale in a fever dream. It was interesting and a quick read.
I was confused most for most of the story, but it keep me turning pages and interested. 300 pages in just over 24 hours. I would say it's a success:)

Finishing this book is like waking from a fever dream, leaving you a little unsure of what you've just experienced and desperately piecing together fleeting images to try and make sense of it all.

And that works beautifully here, perfectly lending itself to the Gothic and suspense-driven feel of this book. From the moment Orabella is brought to her new home as Elias' wife, the disorientation starts. As a reader, you're made to feel the same confusion and distrust of your senses that Orabella experienced. You question whether Orabella is an unreliable narrator, victim to her own overactive imagination and sheltered existence, or everything is as off as it seems. Though, to be fair, you should see from a mile away that there's something in the tea and wine and that should put you on edge.

Comparisons of this novel to Crimson Peak are spot on. The stories share a lot in terms of theme and some of the details that drive the plot, but the overall "villain" and facts of the family that Orabella has married into are different enough to allow Midnight Rooms to stand on its own and earn its own praise.

I did find some of the prose clumsy or overwrought, pulling me out of the dream a little bit, but overall the suspense and visceral imagery kept me turning the pages. As a lover of the Victorian period and stories dealing with the fae, too, I really enjoyed this.

Thank you to NetGalley and Amistad for giving me the opportunity to read this book before its official release.