Thank you NetGalley Margot Harrison and Harlequin Enterprises for the e-book in exchange for a honest review.

This book follows four colleges friends who reunited to honor a friend who died under questionable circumstances. Available to them is a drug to send them back to the past. Will they figure out the circumstances of their friend’s death?

Truth be told this was not my type of book. The idea behind it was very interested it just felt very underwhelming. It was very hard for me to get into. It was also fairly slower to start which really kept me from feeling interested in the book. It jumped around quite a bit which made it hard to keep track of what was happening for me. I was not wowed by the ending either.

The ebook was formatted terribly for kindle. I truly hope that gets resolved in the future.

If sci-fi and time jumping is your thing I’d say read it. And for a debut novel it is well written, so for that 3/5 stars.

This book is quite different indeed. Took a while to get into it and to understand it, but it isn’t a bad thing. It’s something I had to read slowly and comprehend. It’d gotten more interesting as the book went on. So four friends - Sonia, Byron, Paul, and Auraleigh gathered on the 25th anniversary of the death of their 5th friend Jennet.

Auraleigh has questions about her death 25 years later since she thought it was more than just a suicide, so she has her friends relive past memories or travel to those past memories, unlock them to put together the pieces by giving them a “sog”. Feelings among the characters were unlocked, long with those memories.

The book was again…different, but in the end, I felt more could had been answered. I don’t know if I would call it a thriller, but more of a slice of life and magical realism.

(Also in the Kindle version, or when I transferred it to my Kindle, there were constant gaps in Fl words, between the F and the l. )

The Midnight Club follows four college friends coming together decades later to solve the murder of fifth member of their friend group. Overall, I don’t think this was a bad read at all. However, I don’t think it’s my favorite kind of story. It reminded me of We Were Liars, although I think it’s better than We Were Liars, which wasn’t my favorite book to read.

If you like a murder mystery story with some magical/mystical realism and (kinda?) time travel then this book is for you!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for an ARC copy of The Midnight Club.
The premise of this novel was intriguing—a group of former college roommates reunite after 25 years to honor one of them who died under questionable circumstances. Add to this, that in college they were introduced to a drug that allowed them to travel mentally into the future. And now, since in that future, they can travel now back into time. Can doing so help them determine how their roommate died?
Interesting for sure. In execution, it fell a bit flat to me. There is a lot of time jumping and jumping through multiple points of view of the characters. Some of this became jumbled, and it felt the characters had less in common than their supposed friendship required. It took me longer to get through this than I would have liked and was not satisfied at the end. There were also some technical issues with how the ebook read and that made it more frustrating than it should have. If you love sci fi and time jumping, this really is your book.

The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison✨

4🌟

(Thank you NetGalley , Harlequin Publishing and The Hive for giving me the privilege to be an ARC reader for this)

The story revolves around 4 college friends, Bryon, Auraleigh, Sonya, and Paul who later on in life get invited to a “wedding” but in reality it was a reunion for the four of them to catch up and “re-live” their past with the help of a local sap drug called “sog”. If you drank Sog while you were young- you would see glimpses of your future. If you drank sog when you’re older- you would see your past interactions which would all seem too real. To the point where you could alter the past if you truly wanted to.

Together, the four friends initially took the sog to see if they could investigate and truly figure out what happened to their dear friend Jennet that fateful night she drowned. Separately they all had discovered the missing signs that Jennet had been struggling with depression and a huge mystery that had affected Bryon in more ways than one.

In the end they realized that if they changed the past in any way, especially to try and save Jennet, their life as they know it would be gone and never the same.

I applaud Margot for taking 35 years of her life to write this amazing novel. I only wished there were more to the story and maybe looked more into Jennet’s life. I am truly sorry for the loss of Margot’s old colleague who lost her life to suicide at the young age of 23, I loved how it inspired her to write the character of Jennet and I hope she was able to heal during her time of writing.

"The Midnight Club" offers a twisty and nostalgic journey into the past, as a group of estranged college friends reunite to uncover the truth behind a tragic event from their youth. Set against the backdrop of a campus reunion, the novel promises intrigue and suspense with its premise of reliving past memories through a mysterious substance.

This book was interesting, but I left it wanting a bit more. I wanted more details about the pine substance, and answers - I felt a bit unfulfilled at the end. I'd round it up to 3.5 stars. That said, the novel does succeed in capturing the nostalgia of revisiting past loves and mistakes, tapping into universal themes of longing and regret.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I wanted to love this one based on the premise, and there were parts that really delivered. But overall, The Midnight Club didn't work for me. The ending wasn't satisfying because it didn't wrap up the main mystery. It's much more of a cerebral read with sci fi aspects than a traditional thriller, covering grief and nostalgia and asking you to confront those things within yourself. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I read it with that in mind, but traditional thrillers are more of my preferred genre.

“The midnight club” was not at all what I expected! I went into this book relatively blind, except for briefly scanning the synopsis and being captured by the beautiful book cover.

This story was created by the author over multiple decades, the perspective from her youth and the wisdom of going through the experiences and a motions from youth to adult, and how that shapes our mindset and thought patterns.. which is very apt for the plot of the book as it leaves the reader with an open mind and questions about their own lives and choices they may never have thought of before.

The plot follows a group of friends from college who experience a new type of drug that allows you to time travel in a sense, and catch glimpses of the future. Although your physical body stays in the present, your mind is opened to memories and flashes of experiences in the future.

The premise is that our bodies have already lived through our whole lives and our brains already store the knowledge and experience of our future, and the drug just unlocks parts of the brain that allow us to access those memories.

Although things go wrong and one member of the group winds up dead, leaving the rest to go their separate ways. Flash forward to many years later, one member of the group invites them all to return to their pasts and gather together once more to honour their dead. Although there is an ulterior motive and they are looking to find out the truth as to who and how their friend came to pass.

As an adult the same drug now allows to you relieve the memories of the past, they agree to partake to attempt to piece together the events of that dreadful night and finally reveal some truths.

This book was definitely unique with an interesting premise that engages the reader to open their mind. It also makes me question as to whether we only exist in the present moment, or whether our lives have already played out in full and we are long gone, yet our conscious is still catching up and going through the motions of our existence..

Would recommend this book if you are open to deep thinking, alternate reality possibilities, and mystery / suspense with magical / sci fi feels to it

Thank you to Margot Harrison, Harlequin Trade publishing and NetGalley for the EARC

Publish date: September 24

If you could go back in time and change the past, would you?

That's the premise of Margot Harrison's novel The Midnight Club, which reunites four college friends—Sonia, Byron, Auraleigh, and Paul—25 years after the death of their friend Jennet.

While her death was labeled a suicide, Auraleigh is convinced that someone else was responsible for it. She was there the night Jennet died, but she blacked out and has no memory of what happened. She invites her friends back to their Vermont college town to relive their memories leading up to the night of Jennet’s death to uncover the truth.

By taking a drug called sog, they travel through their memories. Sog lets the young glimpse the future. For the older, it offers the chance to relive past memories. Bridging the gap between memory and reality — between what was and what might have been — is as captivating as it is haunting. But each of the four friends has secrets they don't want to be revealed.

Their shared grief and nostalgia coalesce into an examination of how choices reverberate through a life, both intentionally and unexpectedly. Harrison skillfully captures a universal yearning to comprehend the threads of our actions.

In the Behind the Book excerpt at the end of the novel (something I wish more books had), Harrison confesses that The Midnight Club was decades in the making. A project born from a college idea that required the vantage of a life more lived before she could tell the story in its current form. This maturity infuses the work with philosophical weight, urging us to consider what it means to be, as Harrison phrases it in the story, unstuck in time — looping between past regrets/nostalgia or endlessly seeking the future.

The Midnight Club is a page-turner that also invites thoughtful introspection. I wondered if, given the chance, I would dare alter my past. Like the characters in the book, I found that the answer to that question isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

This story, which I hope will be adapted for the screen, is one of my most memorable reads of the year.

The Midnight Club is a thrilling mystery and a contemplation on life, memory, and the inexorable march of time.

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The Midnight Club by Margot Harrison will be released on September 24, 2024.

It took Margot Harrison 35 years to publish The Midnight Club and it was worth it because it is perfection! She began the first draft as a college student fixated on the idea of reliving childhood memories. She wrote the final draft as a middle-aged person drawing on memories of being a confused, alienated young adult. Putting that all together through many different iterations came a story that is so compelling, so enthralling, so very captivating that you literally don't want to put it down to do absolutely anything else.
Four estranged friends gather for a weeklong campus reunion of "The Midnight Club", but soon learn that their host has more than just a reunion planned. She wants them to uncover the truth about the night their friend, Jennet, died in 1989. With the help of a powerful memory drug called Sog, they can not only remember the past, but RELIVE it.
Between both voluntary and involuntary memories, the truth behind the death of Jennet, becomes clearer but also opens the way for so many more questions within their circle. Can secrets and friendship coexist? How well do you really know your friends? If you could go back and change one thing in your past, would you do it? Even if it meant your future would be forever altered?
This was a 5 star read for me, hands down. This book will stay with me for a long, long time. Please, do yourself a favor, and get your hands on a copy when it comes out on September 24th, 2024. Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing, Graydon House for giving me the pleasure of reading this arc.

Review site: Goodreads
Run date: 03/13/24 - eternity

[received arc from netgalley and harlequin trade publishing, thank you!]

ideally an emotional, claustrophobic thriller about past lives and hope for second chances, this book struggles to nail the elements that it needs to succeed where it wants to. for a character-based narrative, the characters that we spend the majority of the narrative with aren't given the proper time to stretch out and establish themselves, and the stakes of the book are hand-wavey and vague. in particular, i was never really convinced that any of these people are friends, much less why any of them are so committed to unearthing their past. i thought that certain aspects of the plot's main 'device' were intriguing, and would've loved to see a bigger payoff of those elements towards the end. sort of a letdown for me!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing for an ARC copy of The Midnight Club.

Oof. I LOVED the idea of this story, but I did not love the execution.

The idea of "sogging" either into the future or the past was really intriguing and definitely my favorite part of the book. I liked the concept of a time travel you couldn't precisely control. Unfortunately, there was so much constant switching between discussing the past, sogging to the past, being in the present, sogging to the future that I found myself having to go back multiple times to re-read when there was a time change with absolutely no warning.

The ending was also very frustrating. I was really invested in the mystery of Jennet's death being solved but there was no clear resolution.

2.5 stars. If I could sog back in time, I would skip reading this book 😬😅

Four friends. A campus reunion. A dark new way to relive the past.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 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.As the estranged friends gather for a weeklong campus reunion, they soon learn that their host has an ulterior she wants them to uncover the truth about the night Jennet died, and she’s provided them with an extraordinary method—a secret substance that helps them not only remember but relive the past.But each one of the friends has something to hide. And the more they question each other, the deeper they dive into their own memories, the more they understand that nothing they thought they knew about their college years, and that fateful night, is true.Twisty, nostalgic, and emotionally thrilling, The Midnight Club explores that innate desire to revisit our first loves, our biggest mistakes, and the gulf between who we are and who we hoped we’d be.

A very fun fast paced thriller. If you enjoyed The Midnight club show on Netflix, you should check this one out. It's like that, only set 25 years later as grown ups. The stories are less YA and more adult themes which I absolutely loved:)