My second Maureen McHugh novel

All of the pieces that I was hoping for in this novel were there: a futuristic sci-fi setting, a narrative full of culture-rich details, and characters whose personas are subtly but unmistakably shaped by their setting. But for some reason, the pieces did not come together for me as well as they did in _China Mountain Zhang_. The novel got off to a very slow start and there was not enough of the main characters to stoke as deep an interest as I was wanting. Maybe if the author had focused on eit...

3.5 stars, but GoodReads still doesn't allow that. I don't understand all the bad reviews this got. I'm a bit biased in that I adore the other McHugh books I've read, but I thought the characters and world building were compelling. Perhaps I wasn't mislead by the description, as I went in completely blind. This definitely isn't a thriller, but there was a building palpable dread that permeated all of Caribe. Loved the world building, and I liked how unexceptional everyone was. Not my favorite Mc...

Set in a city on the floor of the Caribbean ocean in the fairly-near future. I liked the believable and not U.S.A.-based worldbuilding, but was a bit disappointed by the plot and what the characters ended up doing--there was potential that seemed to me to be squandered.

This is a really great premise, and the pacing throughout is decent. McHugh does a wonderful job of showing off her world, rather than just telling you what it looks like. That world is anxiously post-apocalyptic. The characters within, however, are intimate in their humanity. The most joyful scenes, to me, were the ones which have the main characters simply living their lives, experiencing the world around them, and creating joy for themselves.I think that much of this tender beauty, however, i...

When French/Asian war veteran David Dai accepts a job as a security guard to a female banker in the Caribbean, he's expecting to be able to get away from the violence and trauma of fighting in Africa. However, the underwater domes of the cities of Caribe and Marincite are hardly the tropical paradise he was unconsciously expecting. Rather, they are torn by poverty and social unrest, and plagued by corrupt and incompetent authorities. The resentful former holder of his job is still at his employe...

Beautifully described underwater society. I could feel the terror of the main characters as they were faced with issues of fear and claustrophobia. Particularly poignant was David's flashbacks to his days as a soldier.

I love her, but this isn't her best...read Mothers and Other Monsters instead. I love it so much, I gave a copy to my grandmother. How she felt about it, I don't know, but it's the principle. Anyway, I did appreciate the world she created here, but the story felt choppy.

I don’t want to repeat what everyone else has already said about this book, but: it’s not China Mountain Zhang. It feels unfair to compare any book to that absolute master piece but I can't help it.I liked Half the Day is Night alright but I wasn’t blown away by it. The world building was quite interesting, I wasn’t crazy about the characters but they were solid, and the story was fine but perhaps not really my thing.The writing style wasn’t that far removed from China Mountain Zhang and I actua...

While the characters fall flat, the backdrop steals the stage.With the exception of Mothers & Other Monsters, I’ve read all of Maureen McHugh’s novels and anthologies. (“Devoured” is more like it, having consumed them all in the space of just a few months.) While somewhat enjoyable, Half the Day is Night is not McHugh’s best work.Perhaps the lackluster reviews I saw previous to reading the book colored my perception of it, but I had trouble empathizing with – or even caring a whit about – the ch...

It's interesting. For those of you curious, title phrase appears on pg. 286.

This book didn't grab me until page 126, but I'm so enamored with China Mountain Zhang and McHugh's short fiction that I kept plodding along anyway.McHugh does a great job creating an interesting near-future science fiction world and immersing readers in her characters' lives. David and Mayla spend the novel disoriented and traumatized. There's a definite pleasure reading about non-heroic characters dealing with tense situations in fumbling, human ways.But the plot / pacing were muddled, and on

I really wanted to finish this. Truly, I did. I had a big long car trip with which to do so, and everything. And after reading a recent post by Charlie Stross on reading more work by female writers, I decided to give this one a go. It was very engaging in its first half, but then the characters begin making decisions that make very little sense -- one protagonist decides to simply disappear from accusations that have yet to be made, while another succumbs to corporate pressure and loses her life...

No es malo, pero tenía altas expectativas después de China Mountain Zhang

I didn't like the book. The setting itself is not bad but the plot is very boring. I also didn't understand the motivation of the characters and stopped caring after a while. A waste of time. Better read Nekropolis or China Mountain Zhang.It's are real pitty because someone who starts with this book will never pick up a book from the author again.

In the underground city of Caribe in the near-future, Mayla is in the midst of tense financial negotiations. Her insurance agency requires her to have a bodyguard, so she hires David Dai, a former French soldier with an injured knee and a veiled case of PTSD. After terrorists approach David for help and then make an attempt on Mayla's life, David vanishes into Caribe's underworld. Mayla soon follows.Starts wonderfully, but peters out into mind-numbing quotidian detail and plots that the main cha...

McHugh has a great knack for taking ordinary people in ordinary places, putting them in not extraordinarily stressful situations, and producing out of all that a really well-told, well-paced story with characters you care about. She did this very,very well in her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, and she does it almost as well in this one, her second. She also doesn’t make the mistake of stopping to explain when and where the story is set, explaining how history has created this particular futu...

This is my least favorite by this author, though that's not saying much... I just loved the other books I've read by her (China Mountain Zhang, Mission Child, Nekropolis) a lot more. The first half has still really good: McHugh is wonderful at creating a believable setting and inhabiting it with interesting characters. But this setting seemed even less fantastic and the plot even more aimless than usual, and by the end, I was just finishing it to finish it.

This isn't as good as China Mountain Zhang, but not many books are. I still enjoyed this book a great deal- much of it because it reminds me of the Station Eleven comic idea in the book of the same name, as well as the BioShock undersea city of Rapture. It has moments of intriguing ideas, like the cost of air being too high for some and the effect on their voices of the air mix. It didn't entirely gel as a whole for me, although I had fun with the read. The world she has built here is by far the...

Most people regard HALF THE DAY IS NIGHT as McHugh's weakest novel, but I always believed is was one of the best. True, the characters are over-shadowed by the setting and plot, but in this case I see that as the strength of the latter rather than any weakness in the former. It's a fine book, well worth the time of giving it a chance.