Midnight Sun by Trish Cook: A Book Review

Midnight Sun by Trish Cook follows the love story of a girl who can’t go out of her house for
medical reasons and her all-time crush since she was basically a fetus until she was twenty and finally
got her chance with him. It is pretty much the story that we’ve all already heard of 4 years ago, as cliché
as this story goes, it was a well written cliché. Reading this now, I remember myself reading a lot of the
same kind of books four or five years ago. If I read this as a 16 year-old girl I would have squealed. I think
part of the thing that I enjoyed while reading Midnight Sun was the nostalgia that a reading cliché
romantic book brings to me. However, talking about the plot and the character, there’s nothing very
much special about them, none of the things that we haven’t seen already.

I really don’t feel the need to review on the characters because I feel like I’ve already said it; our
main protagonist, Katie Price, is determined to live her short live outside of the box of her disease and
not let it define who she is and how she lived her life—we already heard that in The Fault in Our Stars
and Everythin, Everything—there wasn’t anything else that happened in her life just that we started the
book with her being alive and ending it with her dying, but dying happily because she get to live her life
the way she wanted even for the shortest amount of time she had. Honestly though, without the
novelty of being in a romance book, a lot of the things that she did was stupid. Her character is 20-year
old girl, basically a woman already and considered as an adult, but she acts like a 16 year-old who is
over-driven by hormones the moment she saw her crush and her poor decision making. Most of the
time while I was reading a book I felt like the main character is a child, so I guess that was a poor
character detail. Her love interest, Charlie Reed, is the stereotype popular male lead who suddenly falls
in love with the nobody girl –the level of cliché, am I right?—but Trish Cook tried to make him a little bit
different by giving him a “shit sandwich” which is his injury that doesn’t allow him to play sport anymore
and him questioning his identity without that defining factor about him, and struggling to adjust with his
new social status; it would have been an interesting narrative she started but she did not really went
deep with any of those things. I feel like all of the details she added to character were just merely
decorations to make them seem kind of different but, it doesn’t work like that. Both of them doesn’t
look real enough to be a compelling and complex characters, the chemistry were actually non-existent
and the author did not even try to pretend like it was there. They just got on with the romance and went
with it. They didn’t have any groundbreaking character development because their characters weren’t
even well designed in the first place; where Katie stopped being afraid to try to actually experience what
life could offer which eventually lead to her dying (that was the arc we did not asked for), and Charlie
finding his courage to do what he is passionate about after fighting himself for so long that he don’t and
can’t do it anymore, and eventually not giving up in his dreams and chase it because Katie made him
believe. All that jazz, it was all pretty shallow and I’m currently rolling my eyes as I write that sentence,
but at least the arc was there.

I read this book at the right moment and that might be the only reason I enjoyed it. It was a light
and quick romantic read, which was what I needed after suffering from my first book I DNF’ed books this
year. If you’re a sucker of cliché romance, then you would enjoy reading this. If you’re after complex
characters in romance who grows together but also has separate identity of their own, and compelling
plot, this is not for you. If you’re in a mood for a light and quick read that doesn’t need to take your
breath away or you don’t want another fictional attachment, this one is a good filler read. Rating this 2.8
stars.