Review: Midnight at the Electric

Midnight at the Electric
by Jodi Lynn Anderson
Age Range: 13 & up
Release Date: June 13, 2017
HarperTeen
9780062393548

Time jumping in a story can be tricky. If it isn’t done right, it leaves the reader confused and unsure of the thread of the narrative. At worst, it causes frustration with the book itself. Midnight at the Electric does not have this problem. Anderson starts her story in the year 2065. We then jump back to 1934, then again to 1919, and far from being frustrating, each new time jump pulls you in even farther than the one before.

Our first narrator is Adri, a loner who doesn’t know how to connect with anyone around her. Her life’s purpose has been to go to Mars as a Colonist. When she finally gets the chance, Adri relocates to Kansas for her final months of training and lives with an elderly woman named Lily, her only living relative. In her early days on Lily’s farm, Adri stumbles across a collection of letters from a young woman named Lenore, as well as a journal written by a Catherine Godspeed. This is where the story really drew me in, as we jump back in time to the very same farm in 1934.

The dust storms are everything. The farm where Catherine lives with her mother and her sister Beezie is dying. The Dust Bowl is eating away at everything, including little Beezie’s lungs. Catherine longs for things to get better, just as she longs for their devoted farmhand, but what she wants more than anything is for her sister’s lungs to clear up. This could mean leaving the farm forever, even when those around her are determined to ride the storms out. The letters written by Lenore make their way into Catherine’s life, and here we jump backwards once again.

It is 1919 in England and Lenore has lost her brother to World War I. She processes her life and her grief through writing to her best friend Beth, who has lived in the States for the past four years. Lenore plans to join her there, but even as she dreams of saving the money for travel, she worries about change. Has her best friend changed while she’s been away? Maybe Lenore herself has changed, as she is just now starting to realize her hatred of the grief she sees in others is purely a projection of the grief she so loathes in herself. Lenore is suffocating in her sorrow, and travelling to Beth is both the solution and the thing she fears most.

 Going into Midnight at the Electric, I fully expected to be drawn to the historical narratives, to wish I could go back there whenever 2065 made a reappearance in the story. To my delighted surprise, I found myself just as invested in Adri’s story as I was in Catherine’s and Lenore’s. Each new thread reveals a new mystery (and an appearance by Galapagos, the ever-present, always-watching tortoise), and as Adri tries to figure out what happened to the two women of the past and how they are connected to her in her present, the threads are woven together so deftly that they all feel part of a unit, rather than three separate pieces. This was a pleasant surprise, and Anderson’s newest is a truly satisfying reading experience.

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