I hadn’t planned to start reading this book until next month, but Schopenhauer pissed me off and it was a welcome distraction.
13 Ways to Midnight is a paranormal romance. Echo turns 17 in this book and she’s in love with a vampire. If his nature is a huge reveal to you, you haven’t been paying attention. He climbs walls, he has to be invited in, he’s pale and his eyes change from blue to black. The confusing romance is the foreground to this story, although I have to admit that the hints of things in the background, unresolved by the end of the first work, held more interest for me.
Like the main character’s name, the story feels like an echo. The plot feels familiar, but don’t let that put you off because Echo is a well drawn heroine – quirky, clumsy and awkward. She is told, by everyone, that she’s beautiful, but she cannot believe it. She feels like a lesser version, an echo, of the twin sister who died, Midnight.
13 Ways to Midnight breaks Chekov’s rule, and I do wish more of the mysteries were explained within the first book. The garden, the borrowed book, the mysterious illness, the beast, the aunt’s magic, the father’s obsession. But Volley keeps us guessing beyond the final pages. Want to know what happens? You have to keep reading.
The romance isn’t resolved either. Poor Echo, someone buy her a bottle of sandalwood cologne as it is his smell she seems addicted to. The object of her desire, Thorn, runs hot and cold, turning hot again for the final scene, but who knows for how long. As if there wasn’t enough already to confuse our heroine.
In conclusion, it’s an enjoyable read with a well drawn heroine, but it is not a stand alone. You need to commit to the series from the start. No doubt I’ll be picking up the second book soon, begging for some answers.
4/5 stars.
To find out how Schopenhauer pissed me off, keep reading. I’m only half way through and the book has already become a chore.
- I don't know why I didn't anticipate it from the start, but in Schopenhauer's "On the Suffering of the World" his chapter "On Women" really pissed me off. This is a writer and thinker who claims to see beyond the surface of things but fails completely to imagine that the failings he sees in women could be a direct result of their place in society and his misunderstanding of who they actually are, below the surface. Some of the things he wrote made me laugh (sardonically) and others made me tremble with anger.
I'll share some examples with you. "Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of children precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted."; "[W]omen remain children all their lives, never see anything but what is closest to them, cleave to the present moment, take appearance for reality and prefer trifles to the most important affairs."; "Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies."; "More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please."; "[T]he most eminent heads of the entire [female] sex have proved incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed in creating anything at all of lasting value."
- Schopenhauer wrote another thing that pissed me off. This time it was that people needed to stop reading and start thinking instead. He claimed that reading other people's thoughts stopped us from creating our own. While I think a balance is necessary, reading allows us to expand our knowledge and the language we use, and thereby promotes rather than stifles original thought and allows us to communicate those thoughts more effectively. That's my "original" thought anyway. That and that I should stop reading Schopenhauer.