This book was a trip… literally🌀 The whole time, the characters are basically doing hallucinogens that allow them to time travel through their past memories and see glimpses of their futures 😅 They reunite in their college town to try to figure out the truth of what happened the night their friend died twenty five years ago.

I appreciated how unique this concept was. Our two main POVs follow Sonia and Byron, arguably the two people closest to Jennet. As Harrison takes us through many years of memories and the present day, we see who these characters are now, but also who they used to be before Jennet’s death as we try to piece it all together and figure out what happened.

I liked the differentiation between voluntary and involuntary memories: what we remember in hindsight vs. what actually happened. It made for some unintentional unreliable narrators, which was really interesting!

Truthfully, most of the time travel elements went right over my head, and the explanations just didn’t make sense until about 75% of the way in. And just when I thought I understood it, the ending left me more confused. I see what the author was trying to do, but it just wasn’t working for me. It reminded me a lot of the “dream within a dream” concept from the movie Inception. So if you liked and followed that, you’d probably do better with this book than I did!

Overall, I liked the dark academia vibes, was hooked by the murder mystery enough to continue reading, and had fun with the Halloween spooky season setting. I don’t think this book will be for everyone, but I’m glad I gave this author’s adult debut a shot! I think it will be a hit for the right readers.

If you could see your future, would you? If you could go back to the past and see it as it really was, not how you remember it, would you?
In 1989, Jennet Stark dies, alone in a cold river. In 2014, her friends reunite desperate to remember what happened. They experiment with a drug called ‘sog’ that allows them to re-enter their past selves for a short amount of time, trying to pinpoint their friend’s last moments. Meanwhile, the adults must come to terms with where their lives have gone since college.
This is part whodunnit mystery, part coming of age tale, part finding yourself again philosophical story. It’s imaginative and engaging, and ultimately a quick read as I couldn’t put it down.
Thank you to the publisher, Harlequin Trade Publishing, and NetGalley for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the ARC of the Midnight Club.

2.5 rounded up to 3.

The Midnight Club was such a strange story. It was one of those books that you need to pay very close attention to or you will be lost. There's time travel, of sorts, via a special elixir (sog?) that took the characters back into their old memories. The friend group of four comes back to their college campus to try to solve their friend's death. Was it murder? Was it suicide? Was it an accident? They're hoping these memory travels will help them to figure out what happened. Things get complicated, as things usually do and that's where it went really wrong for me. The memory travel, instead of adding an interesting element, became muddled and boring. The other issue was that I didn't care much for any of the characters. They were all flat and uninteresting and they didn't have much chemistry as a friend group either. I will say that it was a really creative idea. I just don't think it hit the mark all that well.

It’s been twenty-five years since The Midnight Club last convened. A tight-knit group of college friends bonded by late nights at the campus literary magazine, they’re also bonded by something darker: the death of their brilliant friend Jennet junior year. But now, decades later, a mysterious invitation has pulled them back to the pine-shrouded Vermont town where it all began.

This had a lot of potential but fell a little flat for me. I appreciate the attempt but I think the characters and plot twists were a little dull and predictable.

I loved everything about this book from the characters, to the setting and the idea of being able to relive past memories. The alternating viewpoints shifting from past to present helped the story keep its momentum. A must read!

This differs from the trope (friends reunited years after another friend died) due to the use of zog, a drug which allows the user to go into the past if older and into the future if younger. You gotta buy the premise on the drug but regardless, it's an intriguing look at how we change things in our brains over time to fit our hopes and expectations. And how we hide things from ourselves and others. This teeters sometimes but Harrison always pulls it back. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Don't miss the author's note.

Four college friends reuniting 25 years in the future. This should be all fun and games but it’s more of a game than anything. Byron, Sonia, Paul and Auraleigh are trying to remember something and use sog to do it, a memory spa according to Auraleigh. Can they go back and change the past or are they going to be haunted by memories. Would you go back and try and change the past and jeopardize the future?

Spending nearly a quarter of a century to give the reader something that feels half-baked is crazy work. The concept is interesting, but the execution is not up to par. The characters felt like a group of friends falling into nostalgia (in a bad way) and unable to let go of their past, even as we get to the end. I felt no connection to any of the characters, and they lacked any substance to make me feel positively toward them. Some of the prose was decent, but for the most part they fell into being young adults who think they know better, which whether or not that was the point, was not really fun to read. I had to make myself finish this book because I was kept thinking surely it gets better. And there was a part of me that wanted to know how Jennet died. The reveal of her death was......a waste of my time honestly. It felt as though it was supposed to be this grand reveal and betrayal (betrayal it was for me because the investment I made for this was not worth it), but it fell so flat with the explanation. I wanted to like this, but it ultimately was giving mid-life crisis adults who wanna feel something again.

Thank you NetGalley and Graydon House for the eArc!

Thank you NetGally for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

While I really loved the concept of this book, it unfortunately fell flat for me. The story itself and the characters never full captured me, and I pretty consistently found my mind wandering. There was also a large amount of grammatical errors and it lead to me actively being distracted while attempting to read. While I expect a certain number of grammatical errors in an ARC, the amount in this one felt almost egregious. This along with story never fully engaging unfortunately led to me DNFing the book at 25%.

While I normally do not leave reviews or rate DNFs, NetGalley requires it. I do think that this concept is really interesting and that many readers will enjoy it - it's unfortunately just not a book for me.

Scheduled to post 9/25
The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison (2024) – “You are formally invited to a reunion of the Midnight Brunch Club…” Decades after the tragic death of a member of their group, a set of college friends are reunited in the town where it all began. Through the use of a mysterious concoction that the locals call “sog”, they delve into their memories of that time. They hope to finally put to rest the questions around the death, but soon discover that those are not the only secrets revealed.
Why I Liked It – The story winds itself tighter and tighter as each member begins to focus on their own issues surrounding their lives at the time of the mysterious death.
I enjoyed this book a lot. The central concept of returning to a place that was central to your life years before to face an unanswered question is one that grabs me. It’s nostalgia mixed with a mystery and that’s a combination that works well.
Jennet Stark was one of the members of the Midnight Brunch Club at a small college in Vermont in the late 1980’s. The group came together through the college literary magazine. There was Auraleigh, with the personality that drew every eye in any room she entered, Paul, her intellectual boyfriend and editor of the magazine. Sonia, the quiet, shy write who was just happy to be included. Byron, a multi-millionaire now, whose family disintegrated around him while he made his millions. His great love had been Jennet back in the day. Each of them has memories, questions, and fears about the night that Jennet died. It was ruled a suicide. None of them ever understood why Jennet did what she did. Twenty-five years later, Auraleigh invites them all back to remember and explore that night.
There was a “myth” among the locals in Dunstan about a concoction that allows you to step through time. Young folks might see glimpses of their future, older folks could see the past. It’s called “sog”, and as with anything that plays with time, it comes with dangers of its own.
The story is told through three avenues, simple story telling, voluntary memories, and involuntary memories, the ones that come from sessions with sog. The last category gives glimpses of what happened before. Things change as the four friends explore if they can guide them. What they find in the end will destroy some of their firmly held feelings about the past and each other. But it may also offer a closure about the events of the death.
I will admit that it took a chapter or two to get into the rhythm of Harrison’s story telling. Leaping back and forth between the reunion, and the college days (through two different lenses) threw me a little. Given my affection for non-linear storytelling, I’m not sure why that was. The relationships between the characters are filled in gradually. Each of the four central people felt like folks I’d known in my own life. Paul, who retires into his intellectual shell, and Auraleigh, the extrovert that is compelled to order and organize everything and everyone around her. Sonia is Auraleigh’s mirror image. Still too shy to ask Paul for an introduction to people in their shared professional sphere at a moment when she desperately needs that boost. And Byron, who has spent his life trying to make up for mistakes he barely realized he made. The past weighs heavily on them all.
I’m going to predict that this book makes it onto my end of year list of the best books I’ve read this year.
Rating - **** Recommended

📚Book Review 📚

- The Midnight Club by @margotfharrison

Do you enjoy thrillers with a little sci-fi thrown in? Locked room thrillers your jam? Are you a fan of whodunnits? Then this one is for you!!!

Twenty-five years ago four friends had quite the college reunion. They took a new drug that could allow you to time travel while your body was intact. Things go wrong and one of them is found dead.

Now, twenty-five years later, they have been invited to return for another reunion to honor their friend’s memory. However, someone has an ulterior motive, to take the drug to relive the past. Can they find out just who killed their friend and why?

I loved the sci-fi elements of the story, as I’ve been on a sci-fi thriller kick lately! Imagine a drug that could let you see into the future or the past. Crazy right?!

This is perfect for fans of —
- Sci-fi thrillers
- Locked room mysteries/thrillers
- Fans of whodunnits
- Fans of magical realism

I loved and ate this sucker up! Thank you so much to @graydonhousebooks @htpbooks @htp_hive and @margotfharrison for the gorgeous copy! Thank you to @netgalley for the digital arc copy!

Publication Date September 24, 2024
4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Posted review
https://www.instagram.com/p/C_iPpiAx2Zd/?igsh=dmwwZmZrcnRsOThy

I received an ARC of this book through NetGalley. A big thank you for the opportunity!

“Fours friends. A campus reunion. A dark new way to relieve the past.”

That got you hooked right?

The Midnight Club is perfect for fall with its dark academia aesthetic and mystery atmosphere. It features complex characters and even more complicated relationships between them. We explore their past and their present, which creates a very elaborate plotline. You get hooked by the originality of the story, and the need to know what will happen—or should I say what happened—is addicting.

Even with all the good sides I can find for this book, I don’t think I was the targeted audience. It was a slow-paced story, but the information provided was important and needed. So I do understand why the author made this choice. It's not what I prefer habitually, cause I sadly found it boring because of it. I also struggled with the broken timeline and the back and forth. But I do believe that someone who prefers a darker atmosphere and more complex mysteries would enjoy this book. It just wasn’t made for my taste, but it's sill a brilliant story!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for an Advanced Reader’s Copy in exchange for an honest review.

At first, I thought this was going to be another version of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History – group of college students in small town Vermont in the wake of their friends’ death. Because of this, it took me a bit longer to get into the story, but once I understood how different this narrative was, I was hooked.

Harrison writes a compelling narrative, mostly told from the perspectives of Sonia and Byron, returned to their old college town to visit friends Auraliegh and Paul. After their friend Jennet died twenty-five years before by drowning at the falls near campus, the group lost touch.

Their reunion sparks a debate over the details each person remembers from the night Jennet died, and also a nightly ritual during which they all partake in ‘sog’ – a local drug that when taken when the user is young, allows them to see the future. Now, twenty-five years after the death of their friend, they use sog to recall memories from the past. All of them are interested in learning more about what happened the night Jennet died, figuring out who was at the falls, and whether or not her death was truly an accident.

Personally, I liked the way the narrative switched between the past and present. I was able to follow along pretty easily, and liked the slow unravelling of true, false, and recovered memories. I also very much enjoyed Sonia’s love interest, Hayworth, as a character. My only gripe was that I wish the mystery of Jennet’s death – as it truly happened – would have been revealed a bit more to the reader. By the end of the story, I was invested and hoping for answers. That being said, I think Harrison delivers an impressive college-murder-mystery novel here, and I commend her for working on it for so long!

Thank you NetGalley for the arc! These are my honest opinions.

3.5 stars rounded up. Overall, I really liked the premise of the book and the idea of this substance that makes people relive the past. There was a lot of grammatical errors and would be little confusing at some points but not bad enough to distract totally. I enjoyed the characters they were very realistic. This book kept me intrigued all the ay through wondering what happened with Jennet and if things would get changed. Great read to start off spooky season !

Margot Harrison spent decades working on The Midnight Club. It shows how much love and care she's put behind the story, as well as the care that she's taken to honor her deceased friend.

The Midnight (Brunch) Club is all called back to Vermont, 25 years after the tragic death of their friend Jennet. Blending the past, present and future, this story is one of regret, of chance, of change. It's magical realism, a little science fiction, and overall, a love letter to those groups of friends from your early 20s.

What IF you could see your future? What IF you can see the past? Can you change either?

The Midnight Club takes these ideas and turns them upside down.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Book: The Midnight Club
Author: Margot Harrison
Rating: 3 Out of 5 Stars

I would like to thank the publisher, Graydon House, for sending me an ARC. This is another case where the book just was not for me. It wasn’t a bad book by any means. I just was not the right audience for it. I have seen it compared to Ninth House, which is another title that did not work for me.

In this one, we follow a group of university friends who have a past that haunts them. It has been twenty-five years since their group, called the Midnight Club, last met. They have bonded over a literacy magazine. However, that is not the thing that has made them stay together all this time. Death has been a part of their group. As time has gone on, they have all moved away from each other and built their own lives. That is until they are all invited back to the place where it all began. On the outside, it seems like a reunion of old friends, but that is not the real reason why they have been brought here. Their host wants to uncover what happened all those years ago. Questions and answers will not be enough to uncover the truth. She comes armed with a substance that will make everyone remember what happened twenty-five years ago. The thing is though that one of their group has a secret and will stop at nothing to make sure it stays a secret.

As with so many books, it was this presence that made me want to read this. We have a tight group of friends who have been haunted by the death of one of them. They don’t know what happened and someone wants to find out. All of our characters have moved on with their lives or so it seems. The events of twenty-five years have marked them. The chance to see everyone again has them interested. They think it is going to be a fun reunion, but as they get deeper into the reunion, they come to see that is not the case.

This setup is something that I love in books. I love it whenever we have a tight group of friends with secrets. I love it whenever these secrets and the determination to keep them a secret drive them. Sadly, though, I found it very difficult to form a connection with both the characters and what is going on. It started strong. I will admit that for the first fifty or so percent, I was hooked on this book. However, as it went on, the more I found myself losing interest in what was happening. I found myself putting the book down and not wanting to get back to it right away.

It wasn’t an issue with the writing or the plot. However, I will admit that there were times I found the plot to be missing something. The writing was lacking some of the punch that it needed to fully drive the book home. Yet, this usually is not enough to make me want to put the book down. It was the fact that I had a very difficult time feeling a connection.
The characters were okay, but I could not make a connection to them. I had a difficult time remembering who was who and what their role was supposed to be. Again, whenever I cannot make a connection with the characters, it makes me not enjoy the book as much as I should. It’s a shame too, because there are truly some great characters in this one. It felt like they were not given the chance to develop into both their voice and their person. It felt like they had a role to play in the story and that was all they were. They didn’t have the human element that I look for in books.

Overall, this is not a terrible book, but it was not the book for me.

This book comes out on September 24, 2024.

This was a really interesting concept but I found the execution difficult. I struggled to connect to the characters and it felt really drawn out in a way that kept pulling me out of the drama and mystery. This wasn't a good fit for me.

This was really just not for me. The premise intrigued me but maybe I’ve read too many books in the same vein, I didn’t really care about these characters or the plot much.

A huge thank you to NetGalley for letting me read this ARC that was perfect for the start of fall. A lighter mystery thriller shrouded in confusion, secrecy, and four individuals learning for more about themselves through the past than they ever thought possible. Overall this story kept me on my toes and was filled with mystery, sogging (lots of that word), and had a good amount of that dark academia feel. My main critique was not fully understanding the jumps in time and overall feel of what the drug did exactly, especially early on in the story. Perhaps this could also be the authors intention. For me, I would have liked to understand a little more about the details early on. Overall worth the read for a short burst of mystery and small town academia.

The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison, pub 9/24 from Graydon House. A mashup of dark academia, speculative fiction, and the movie Flatliners. Four friends return to their Vermont college after 25 years for a reunion. They are bound by the unique ties made during college years, and a tragic loss of a friend. Would you go back 25 years to uncover the truth of your friend’s death…if it uncovered your truth as well? Save the authors note for after you read the book, but know this was written over several decades. It gives the book an interesting feel, a depth, from optimism of youth, to experience of a life lived. Perfect for fans of The Cloisters by Katy Hays. I highly recommend.

I received an early copy from the publisher.