A review by enchantingreads_rosyreviews
Midnight Mass by Sierra Simone

emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Of all the ghosts that haunt me, it is the priest who stays the closest, who dogs my steps from dawn until dusk. It’s the priest who reminds me of my sins, of everything I’ve left behind, of every part of secular life that is flat and colorless and petty. It is the priest who tells me to be afraid of being punished. Like I’m not already afraid.

This is a novella sequel to Priest & it follows Tyler & Poppy after the end of the previous book. It tries to answer the question: what happens after their Happily Ever After? We catch up with them 3 years later & it’s not all sunshine & rainbows for the couple. Tyler is still struggling with his self-worth & burdened by the stereotypical Catholic Guilt, while trying to figure out his future in his career & as a husband.

My guilt was my language, my sustenance, my pulse. And maybe Millie was right—I was letting it bleed into parts of my life where it didn’t belong... Today there was just me and my guilt, and God was nowhere to be found.

This book is kinda told in 2 parts: 1) they have some issues, fight about them, do *it* & then their issues still remain (shocker!... not!); and 2) they stop doing *it* to actually talk but it’s challenging to sort everything out. The first part of the book? I didn’t like it because it felt inauthentic to the characters who fell in instant love by talking to each other (but, yea, they also connected by doing *it* as well). But the second part, I liked. It felt real to their relationship & this HEA was earned. [Also, quick annoyance I have to get off my chest: I hate how Poppy just dips out. Sure, Tyler is flawed & he makes mistakes, but she just abandons him/them instead of talking it out... rude.]

While I liked Priest better, Jacob Morgan's performance wasn't any less stellar for this book. Yet again, he's the only narrator (except for the epilogue, that Elena Wolfe narrates). Throughout this book, we get Tyler's possessive qualities, guilt about his possessive nature not matching up with his feminist nature, comedic relief, self-loathing for battling with his place in his religion, & infatuation with his wife. And yet again, Jacob's performance of Poppy's lines (or any female lines for that matter), did not make me cringe. Yes, the spice was spicy, including, but not limited to, breathy moans, but the inner monologues & emotional vulnerability absolutely delivered as well. I kinda feel like Jacob can do no wrong in his performances, for me at least. His voice definitely adds to my enjoyment of this book/series.

And this quote is probably my favorite, as Sierra examines the church as an institution through Tyler's studies:
Life is a spiral. As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again... It applied to institutions too. Like churches... Because historically, the church had its own spiral, times where it had been forced to modernize or adapt, great leaps forward in humanitarianism and philosophy, and giant leaps back with dogma and persecution. The Church didn’t need me to tell it how to change. It already knew how, because it had done it so many times before.
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