The Midnight Dress by Karen Foxlee is set in Leonora, a small, quaint town that is snuggled up nicely between a beach and a forest. Rose Lovell, a 15-year-old high schooler, has just moved here with her father. She is now adjusting to life in a new town just as she has so many times before due to having to constantly move around with her father. When Rose breezes into town, it is the time of the Harvest Festival; a festival where girls put together their best dresses and organize a parade. Rose is a bit apprehensive at first, but with the help of an old dress maker, and some motivation from a new friend, Pearl, she makes the dress of her dreams…..at a price.

The way the book is set up is very unique. Foxlee has formatted the book so that you see two timelines: Before the festival, and after. At the beginning of every chapter, we see the story from the view of a cop investigating the murder of a girl post-Harvest Festival. Then we switch to  Rose’s perspective chronicling what happened before the festival. ThI found the changing perspectives format very unusual but a welcome change from the average day-by-day format of a regular novel.  Overall, I feel like it works very well for this book as it makes readers ask,”What led up to this? Why is this happening? Who did it?” The author definitely keeps you on your toes.

Overall, there wasn’t much I disliked, other than a few unrealistic situations. (Only a few.) Otherwise, the story is really interesting and it kept me hooked right to the end. If you’re looking for a mysterious story that will keep you guessing, I’d recommend The Midnight Dress for  you!

When I set out to read Paradox, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. All the cover could tell me is that it involved a girl who couldn’t remember herself and a giant worm. And indeed it did involve this, and a whole lot more.

Paradox is about Ana, a girl who has no memory of her past and wakes up on an alien planet, Paradox, with a pack full of survival gear, a high tech watch equipped with a map and a timer counting down, and instructions to reach a certain point before the timer reached zero. Zero means sunsmeet, the violent and deadly reaction when the two suns of Paradox cross paths. But something isn’t quite right on Paradox; Ana keeps getting odd glimpses of memory, the companions she finds seem to know more than they claim, and all the while, a giant alien worm bent on devouring them follows them across this supposedly uninhabited planet. The very landscape seems to warp as her companions are killed off in mysterious ways, and when sunsmeet happens… well, I won’t spoil the twist, but I can assure you, it is big.

Paradox was definitely an interesting read, but it felt disconnected and scattered at times.
It’s a long time, more than halfway through the book, before certain things that didn’t make sense in the beginning start to tie in, and it was in a way didn’t mesh well with me. The lost memory device I find is a little overused, and though it does make sense in the context of the book, I still found it jarring when Ana had a revelation in the style of “Oh, that totally makes sense because I just remembered that it did.” However, I still did enjoy the book. I was enraptured by the vivid descriptions of this alien landscape and compelled to keep reading to find out what would happen to Ana next, what she would discover.

If you’re looking for a quick read with a sci-fi/mystery flavor, I’d definitely recommend you have a look!