Following multiple lives over six decades, this is a story of cultural shifts, the effects of racial prejudice, and family secrets. Joy Osmanski's narration is engaged and easy to listen to. There are times when her narration is uneven and character accents are inconsistent, but she moves the story along at an excellent pace. Will Damron capably narrates a few descriptive paragraphs at the beginning to set the scene. During the '50s, as bombs are explode in Nevada's deserts to entertain Las Vegas tourists, four sets of characters experience the destruction caused by prejudice and social upheaval in their lives. The author skillfully integrates the lives of vivid and realistic characters, bringing them to a satisfying and surprising denouement in the final chapters. L.M.A. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
'Round Midnight
Narrated by Joy Osmanski, Will Damron
Laura McBrideUnabridged — 11 hours, 17 minutes
'Round Midnight
Narrated by Joy Osmanski, Will Damron
Laura McBrideUnabridged — 11 hours, 17 minutes
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Overview
From the author of the acclaimed novel We Are Called to Rise comes a “jewel of a novel” (BookPage) about four vivid and complicated women in Las Vegas whose lives become connected by secrets, courage, tragedies, and small acts of kindness.
Fun-loving and rebellious, twenty-one-year-old June Stein abandons the safe world of her New Jersey childhood for edgy 1950s Las Vegas. For the next 60 years, June will dare to live boldly. She will upend conventions, risk her heart and her life, rear a child, lose a child, love more than one man, and stand up for more than one woman.
June's story will intertwine with those of three unlikely strangers: a one-time mail order bride from the Philippines, a high school music teacher, and a young mother from Mexico working as a hotel maid. Knit together around June's explosive secret, they forge a future that none of them foresee.
This jubilant, compassionate novel explores the unexpected ways that life connects us, changes us, and even perfects us. A powerful story of lust and of hope, of redemption and of compassion, In the Midnight Room is a smart, sagacious novel about womanhood, family bonds, and how we live in America now.
Editorial Reviews
03/20/2017
McBride’s (We Are Called to Rise) second novel tells the moving, intertwined stories of four women in Las Vegas. In 1960, June and her husband, Del, run the El Capitan casino and draw crowds with talented singer Eddie Knox. June’s life seems blessed until a tragedy strikes that will upend everything and force her to reconsider running the casino. Jumping forward to the 1990s, Honorata is a mail order bride from the Philippines, sold by her own uncle, who now lives a comfortable life in Las Vegas as the housewife of a wealthy man—until she wins the jackpot at El Capitan. Coral is a music teacher in a Las Vegas school and stops by the casino frequently, drawn by the memories of her father, who was Del’s best friend. Meeting up with her siblings, past events are revealed and considered in a new light, and Coral discovers how to move beyond old hang-ups. In the last section, taking place in 2010, Engracia works at the now-decrepit El Capitan as a housekeeper to support her young son until her heart is broken by an unexpected loss. In addition to being linked by El Capitan, this diverse group of complex women intersect in surprising ways as the years pass. Las Vegas itself is a character in this immersive novel that effectively exhibits the changes to the city throughout the decades. This is a tale of love, loss, and the unexpected, unheralded ways that lives meet around blackjack and roulette tables. (May)
"Laura McBride braids a compelling, heartbreaking narrative of four women—June, Honorata, Engracia and Coral—whose lives are transformed by the El Capitan....McBride is skilled at handling multiple narrative threads, but more simply, she knows how to do what Vegas does: lure a passerby in, hook them with a good story and leave them wanting more."
"A beautiful novel about families and love and complications of human relations....Superb."
"Through outstanding character development and beautifully crafted storytelling, McBride uses the stories of four seemingly insignificant women to weave her tale into the readers' heartstrings."
"Redemption in doing the right thing, the solace of accepting fate, perhaps, echoes through 'Round Midnight. McBride crafts passages of sterling imagery and diction....Mostly, though, she tells an honest Las Vegas tale about life and fate, with characters, not caricatures."
"I’m not one to pull out the term “Great American Novel,” but Laura McBride’s sublime ‘ROUND MIDNIGHT demands nothing less. Gorgeous, engrossing, moving, and at times wickedly funny, this brilliant novel pulled me in and didn’t let me go until the shattering final sentence. This is the novel you need to read right now."
"Laura McBride reminds us of the invisible threads that bind us together as she weaves the stories of four very different women into a haunting tale of love, loss, and the power to endure. A compelling, transporting, and deeply wise novel. I was enthralled from the first page. Laura McBride is a stunning storyteller."
"When Laura McBride starts a novel, her characters lead the way as she writes."
"[A] jewel of a novel. Haunting and unpredictable, ’Round Midnight is the beautifully told story of how fates intertwine in ways we can’t plan."
"In the opening pages of Laura McBride’s new novel, June Stein dives off the Haverstraw Bridge and straight into the reader’s imagination. I love how June, and the vivid, complicated women around her, often fail to act in their own best interests while they still win our affection and admiration. And I love how McBride brings to life the fast-changing city of Las Vegas through their intertwined stories. ‘Round Midnight is a passionate, gripping and beautifully written novel."
"If McBride is trying to prove what one of her characters declares—that if you change one life, you change the world—she succeeds magnificently....McBride powerfully addresses an important theme, namely, how much a personal choice can impact others and even alter history."
"A dangerous romance and a captivating character make "Round Midnight memorable...illuminating...thrilling...heartbreaking...You'll fall in love."
"It's not often that a work of literature is able to move its readers to slow down and savor its signifigance, coaxing them into prying open its complexities one by one with a sense of wonder and anticipation. Equal parts intricate and graceful, 'Round Midnight accomplishes just this."
"If McBride is trying to prove what one of her characters declares—that if you change one life, you change the world—she succeeds magnificently....McBride powerfully addresses an important theme, namely, how much a personal choice can impact others and even alter history."
Following multiple lives over six decades, this is a story of cultural shifts, the effects of racial prejudice, and family secrets. Joy Osmanski's narration is engaged and easy to listen to. There are times when her narration is uneven and character accents are inconsistent, but she moves the story along at an excellent pace. Will Damron capably narrates a few descriptive paragraphs at the beginning to set the scene. During the '50s, as bombs are explode in Nevada's deserts to entertain Las Vegas tourists, four sets of characters experience the destruction caused by prejudice and social upheaval in their lives. The author skillfully integrates the lives of vivid and realistic characters, bringing them to a satisfying and surprising denouement in the final chapters. L.M.A. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
2017-03-07
An intergenerational tale of four women—white, black, Filipina, and Mexican—set in Las Vegas from the 1950s to the present.Starting with June Stein, who runs away from a boring marriage in New Jersey and marries a budding casino owner, McBride (We Are Called to Rise, 2014, etc.) ties together the stories of women who live in Las Vegas and the children they raise, love, and sometimes lose. Coral, who grows up thinking she knows her parentage but later learns she was adopted, buys a house on the same street as Honorata, a Filipina immigrant whose life is changed one night in June's casino. Honorata hires an undocumented immigrant house cleaner, Engracia, whose part in the novel is to bring closure to both Honorata's and Coral's stories and who also brings the book full circle back to June, via the casino. What little is told of Engracia's life is both timely and interesting and merits more attention. Each of the four women makes decisions based on love, decisions which lead either to sacrifices, secrets, or both. Men enter the story briefly, cast as good husbands or complete disasters. Each of the women ends up feeling as June does: "Her world spun and spun, and all these ordinary parts of it, these things that made perfect sense, did not make sense at all. What was she doing? And what would she do now?" There's enough information about June, Coral, Honorata, and Engracia to provide snapshots of their lives and compel readers to turn the pages, but not much more. Touching on questions of race and class, McBride doesn't break new ground and doesn't go into much depth but tells a readable story that may appeal to book clubs who'd like to add their own analyses.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940171293826 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
’Round Midnight
To celebrate victory in Europe, June Stein dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
A few months earlier, she had bought an eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder on a day trip to the city—snuck into the shop while her mother was choosing a hat next door—and spent the spring flicking ashes on the track as she smoked behind the stairs of the boy’s gym. In April she wore stockings to school, and bent over the water fountain to highlight the brown seams running along the backs of her legs. Leon Kronenberg said he had touched her breast. When Mr. Sawyer came back from the summer holidays with a goatee, June Stein breathed in, licked her lips, and shuddered.
She was bad for the neighborhood.
Things happened to other girls because of June Stein.
When she married Walter Kohn at nineteen, most people figured she was pregnant. June Stein would get her due. She’d be stuck in Clinton Hill for life; Walter Kohn was going to be bald in three years, like his father and his uncle Mort.
But at twenty, June Stein disappeared.
She was gone for six months.
When she came back, Walter Kohn had become something of a catch. People thought it was wrong that his wife had left him. They said she’d gone to Reno, gotten a divorce, that she’d never been pregnant, she had just wanted to have sex, and now that she’d had it, now that she’d used Walter Kohn—who did have beautiful blond hair and the bluest eyes—she’d gone and left him, and who knows what man she might try to take up with next.
June Stein returned a pariah.
It was a role she had cherished, but at twenty-one, she found it less amusing.
She had not gone to Reno.
She had gone to Las Vegas, and the lights and the shows and the desert air, the dust and the heat and the way one felt alone in the universe, were more appealing in memory than they had been when she lived them. There had been only a handful of Jews in town, and none she found interesting, so while she was waiting for the divorce, she hung around a different crowd: locals mostly, born and raised Nevadans, and some that had come in for the gambling boon. And they rose in stature after she moved back to her parents’ house, after even her friends expressed sympathy for Walter Kohn—who had taken the newspaper into the bathroom with him each morning—and there was the way her mother looked at her in the evenings, and the way her father kept asking if she would like to take a stenography course. One day June Stein packed a suitcase, including the eighteen-inch silver cigarette holder, called a taxi, and flew all night from Newark to Las Vegas.
She didn’t even leave a note.
But that was June Stein.
Prettiest girl in Clinton Hill.
And the only one who ever dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge.
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