Thursday, November 11, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Mirror: Shattered Midnight by Dhonielle Clayton

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on January 18, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Mirror: Shattered Midnight is book 2 of the four book Disney Publishing YA Fantasy series, "The Mirror", a four book series focusing on a family over several generations as written by four women of color authors known for their other YA SF/F works - Julie C Dao, Dhonielle Clatyon, J.C. Cervantes and L.L. McKinney.  The first book, Julie C Dao's "Broken Wish" (my review here), told about the start of the family (or well two families at the beginning) in 19th century Germany and ended with the creation of the series' eponymous archetype, a magic mirror.  It was a fine, but unexceptional story, with some notable omissions from the setting (Religious prejudice was bizarrely absent) but a solid start.  

This second book shifts the story to 1928 (Prohibition era) New Orleans, and features a Black (well mixed race, but mostly Black) girl who loves Jazz, and who has a combination of music and magic in her veins, dealing with racism, interracial love and fears of what she can do.  And again the book features a strong lead protagonist, and a really strong setting as it investigates the racial atmosphere of 1920s New Orleans through its Black protagonist and her White love interest.  It's also really short and nearly novella length, so it won't take long to read.  Still, a lot of what happens within is predictable, and by nature of being the second of a four book arc, Shattered Midnight is limited in terms of where its ending can go, which prevents it from being a clear recommend for those looking for YA reading.  I'll still probably try out the third book at this point though, for what it's worth.  

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Zora Broussard is basically alone in New Orleans.  In her old life, under her real name, she had a good family in New York, with an Oma (grandmother) who taught her about the magic in her blood, magic that comes out when Zora makes music - the love of her life.  But now her Oma is gone, and Zora's magic came out in an accident that resulted in disaster for her family, and forced her to flee to her Aunt and her uncaring cousins in New Orleans - an Aunt who doesn't care for music and just wants Zora to be a proper lady.  

But while Zora fears her magic, she still wants nothing more than to be free to make music - the Jazz that her father taught her to love so much.  And so, despite it being dangerous for a black girl in 1928 in New Orleans, she sneaks out at night to a club where she moonlights as a jazz singer, where she can let loose with a fellow friend.  

And it's at this club that she meets Phillip, a well off white boy with a tremendous skill on the Piano - and an attraction to Zora that she knows at once is mutual.  But it's dangerous for a black girl - even one mixed in ancestry - to love a white man in 1920s New Orleans, and anyone discovering their tryst could get them killed.  And then there's Phillip's family heirloom, a magic mirror that seems to foretell a grave future for Zora, one he is desperate to stop. 

Will Zora's magic result in her destruction as she fears?  Or will it be the mundane prejudice of New Orleans?  To fight off both, Zora will have to make choices she could never have imagined, ones that will change her fate and that of her bloodline....forever.  
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Okay that's way too long of a plot summary for this book, I admit, especially for a book this short, but I wanted to hit all the important points - and honestly the Mirror isn't an important point in this book, but it's the name of the series so I felt I had to fit it in.  Still, you get the picture: this is a classic setup mixed with a bunch of other elements that provide some freshness to the story: so you have a Cinderella like restricting Aunt and Cousins....except the Aunt really does think she's doing what's best for a young black girl and the cousins may be not friendly but they are understandable in their desires....you have a magical girl except she fears and dislikes her magic due to what it's done....and you have a girl loving music but threatened by the racial prejudice in prohibition era New Orleans.  

It's a setup that honestly could fit a longer book, and the book probably could use more page length, but Clayton does pretty well with the space she has here.  Zora is a girl easy to love and root for - her conflicted feelings about her magic, her conflicted feelings about the idea of loving Phillip (vs her aunt's preferred beau for her, a seemingly kind black man named Christophe), and her love of music are all really easy to understand and make her a character with depth, who struggles with her emotional issues - because in more than a few ways, she does agree with her aunt that her magic is a bad thing and that she's not sure the danger of Phillip is worth it....at least at first.  And Philip is a realistic mix of privileged White boy underestimating the dangers of his being with Zora (and underestimating the problems his best friend Rocco is involved with) and someone sweet and charming who you can easily see Zora falling in love with.  And the setting (which also includes a conjure woman as you might expect from this version of New Orleans) provides a really strong set of conflicts for them. 

Still the shortness of this book does prevent this book from hitting the next level, most notably by limiting the development of all the characters who aren't Zora or Phillip.  And so while the minor characters get moments that make them feel real, whenever they have major story affecting plot decisions they feel kind of jarring and out of nowhere, because the book doesn't really develop those characters enough to make those decisions understandable - so a pair of really nice good characters make mean turns out of nowhere (that you could understand if there was a few more pages dealing with them, but there aren't) and a mystery antagonist who shows up 2/3 of the way through doesn't actually do anything....although I suspect that antagonist will show up in future books.  And the ending you just know, especially after book 1, can't be entirely happy, because otherwise it wouldn't lead properly into the next book.  There's a lot to like here, and with another 50-100 pages - and perhaps a separation from this series - you could see how this would be a really big winner.  

Still there's enough here to like and enough craft that I'll try to get around to book 3, to see where the story takes successive generations.  This book is probably a bit better than book 1, so if book 3 also shows improvements, it could be well worth the wait.  

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