Midnight at the Electric

Divided by time, connected by friendship: great for teens and adults!

This is my first time reading anything by this author, and I have to say that I am quite impressed! The plot of this story is  complex--when I first received this recommendation from a friend and looked at the storyline, I was like, wow, that’s a tall order to try to make cohesive in a book that's not very many pages!  I admired the skill of the author to tie the three storylines together so cohesively--I am not going to be able to sum it up well in just a few paragraphs though, but I will try!

 

This is a book that young adults and adults will enjoy. It would be a great pick for a mother-daughter-grandmother book club!

It is a sci-fi "light" book. It crosses genres between science fiction and historical fiction, so it's a good pick if those genres are not something you normally read and want to give them a try.

 

There are three storylines in this book: one takes place in the future (hence the sci-fi element) and the other two stories take place in the past from us (hence the historical fiction element).

 

The main character of the story lives in the year 2065: the Earth is dying and Adri, an orphan, is one of the lucky few people that have been selected to colonize Mars. A few weeks before the launch, she discovers that she does have family left on earth. She reconnects with this elderly eccentric distant relative named Lily, who lives in an old farmhouse that once belonged to someone in Adri’s family. While Adri's exploring the house, she discovers a journal from a girl named Catherine who lived there during the Dust Bowl. Adri gets enthralled with Catherine's story and wants to find out what happened to her. To tie up loose ends before she leaves Earth forever, Adri starts digging into her family’s past.

 

Then the story switches gears to 1934, the Dust Bowl, America is in the Great Depression, and in Kansas all the dirt is blowing away. There’s constant dust in the air, it feels like the world is ending, and poor Catherine is feeling very helpless as her family farm is ruined and her little sister is deathly ill because breathing all that dust seems to affect young people the worst. But there is brightness: Catherine has fallen in love with the boy. Catherine knows that she needs to get her sister out of Kansas, but she will have to do it on her own because this boy and her mom are determined to stay. Then Catherine's mother gives her some letters from a woman named Lenore...

 

1919: Lenore lives and England post World War I, her brother has died in the war, her family is grieving, and Lenore plans to leave England and go to America to be with her best friend. Then she meets this like horribly burned soldier, who begins to make her question whether her friendship that has been long distance for so long is legitimate, and whether she and her friend will have the same relationship when they reunite.

 

It's three complex, connected stories, once the mystery of it all is solved...  It's beautiful and heartbreaking.

 

Divided by time and generations, these families/friends are connected through the environmental chaos and human destruction.