April Book Reviews: The Year’s Midnight by Rachel Neumeier
A book from one of the authors I like which happened to be free on kindle at the time. This was an interesting reverse-portal fantasy– this is technically a spoiler but I think it’s fairly obvious to the reader that Tenai comes from another world. But the pov Daniel is a psychiatrist at a local hospital, and he doesn’t know this. Convinced that learning her story is key to helping her, he slowly hears about what happened to her.
This is a novel setup, one which is obviously poised to plunge into more serious portal fantasy goings-on in the next books. But this book is a relatively gentle story as Tenai slowly recovers from her traumatic past, titular deal with Death, and centuries-long quest for vengeance. Daniel may not really believe that Tenai’s story is factual, but he (accurately) senses that she’s gone through an awful lot, and as a competent psychiatrist he carefully helps her work through it.
Both a story about trauma that takes recovery seriously and a book which examines the consequences of leaving your world so abruptly. I rather liked this one and I’ll likely be reading the sequels.
