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A review by brooke_review
Midnight on Beacon Street by Emily Ruth Verona
3.0
Emily Ruth Verona’s Midnight on Beacon Street is a novel with a concept that has such potential. I purposely chose to read this book during spooky season because I was expecting it to be so atmospheric and nostalgic. How could it not, being a thriller set in the 90s during October, chronicling a teenage babysitter battling to keep her young charges alive? Unfortunately, as I quickly learned, there’s a lot of ways this promising premise can go disastrously south. That’s not to say that I did not enjoy this book, but rather that I kept expecting more until I realized I was nearly at the end of the story and nothing significant had happened. Talk about disappointing.
Verona lightly touches on 90’s nostalgia and pop culture, especially by way of slasher movies, but I expected there to be so much more. It makes me question if Verona was actually a child of the 90s herself to get things so terribly wrong. You could take the characters in her story and plop them down into a book about any decade, and they would still fit - they are that generic. There were so many special and unique aspects of being a kid growing up in the 90s that kids of other generations did not and will not experience, and Verona failed to capitalize on any of them. Midnight on Beacon Street lacks any and all of those generational nuggets that would make any Millennial remember and long for their childhood.
Furthermore, the cover of this book gives off such ominous and spooky vibes, but this novel is just not that. There is an incredible lack of atmosphere between the pages of this book. We are talking about a time when parents were not quite as guarded as they are nowadays, and when people were generally unreachable because there were no cell phones! Prime material for a horror novel about babysitting! But Verona just never drove home how dire of a situation the characters of this novel were in.
Every aspect of this novel was downplayed. The revelation at the end came out of left field and was entirely underwhelming. I actually felt like I had missed something because it felt so disjointed and did not make sense.
In all, this was a novel that could have been great, but isn’t. I enjoyed reading it, but found myself sorely disappointed at the end because I wanted so badly to love this book, but didn’t.
Verona lightly touches on 90’s nostalgia and pop culture, especially by way of slasher movies, but I expected there to be so much more. It makes me question if Verona was actually a child of the 90s herself to get things so terribly wrong. You could take the characters in her story and plop them down into a book about any decade, and they would still fit - they are that generic. There were so many special and unique aspects of being a kid growing up in the 90s that kids of other generations did not and will not experience, and Verona failed to capitalize on any of them. Midnight on Beacon Street lacks any and all of those generational nuggets that would make any Millennial remember and long for their childhood.
Furthermore, the cover of this book gives off such ominous and spooky vibes, but this novel is just not that. There is an incredible lack of atmosphere between the pages of this book. We are talking about a time when parents were not quite as guarded as they are nowadays, and when people were generally unreachable because there were no cell phones! Prime material for a horror novel about babysitting! But Verona just never drove home how dire of a situation the characters of this novel were in.
Every aspect of this novel was downplayed. The revelation at the end came out of left field and was entirely underwhelming. I actually felt like I had missed something because it felt so disjointed and did not make sense.
In all, this was a novel that could have been great, but isn’t. I enjoyed reading it, but found myself sorely disappointed at the end because I wanted so badly to love this book, but didn’t.