Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks

Over the years I’ve seen a game bouncing back and forth between book bloggers and vloggers called On My Shelf. The core concept is pretty simple: number each book on your shelf, and then have fellow readers pick a number at random. You are then to write about that correlating book – you can write about anything related to this book – the story behind it, why you bought it, what you loved about it, etc.

All credit to Iain Broome, whom I’m fairly certain is the original creator of this super fun game. Or at least the first one I saw doing this. However, I’m going to modify is slightly in my case. I’m going to use a random number generator as a way of choosing which book to write about.

Bookcase Number: 2 | Shelf Number: 4 | Book Number: 19

Midnight Strikes by Zeba Zhahnaz

“Chandelier light hugs the hollows beneath his cheekbones as dearly as if they, too, were carved centuries ago by kings and princes long gone—an arresting beauty built for precisely this dripping-gold world.”

Oh! Well, at least this pull (sort of) makes up for the last one. I recently read Midnight Strikes, so it’s super fresh in my memory. I was lucky to nap a special copy of Midnight Strikes through my OwlCrate sub, and I adore the cover.

Unfortunately, I didn’t end up loving the content quite as much. I ended up rating this one at three stars but with good reason! While the core premise had a lot of promise (think Groundhog Day but in a fantasy setting…and slightly higher stakes for the kingdom), the follow-through had some issues.

Basically, it was a story where time kept looping, so a bit of repetition was inevitable. However, the problem (for me) was that we crossed the line and hit too much repetition. Many of Anaïs’ attempts were frustrating at best – and distracting at worst. We could have cut half of them out and still had a perfectly good story. Actually, what I’m trying to say is that the story would have been better that way.

I don’t want it to sound like I hated the book – I didn’t! I loved the more lyrical way in which Zeba Zhahnaz wrote. This was her debut novel, and you can see the potential. I’ll be keeping an eye out for future work, no doubt.

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