Midnight Strikes - Zeba Shahnaz

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Seventeen-year-old Anaïs just wants tonight to end. As an outsider at the kingdom’s glittering anniversary ball, she has no desire to rub shoulders with the nation’s most eligible (and pompous) bachelors—especially not the notoriously roguish Prince Leo. But at the stroke of midnight, an explosion rips through the palace, killing everyone in its path. Including her.

The last thing Anaïs sees is fire, smoke, chaos . . . and then she wakes up in her bedroom, hours before the ball. No one else remembers the deadly attack or believes her warnings of disaster.

Not even when it happens again. And again. And again.

If she’s going to escape this nightmarish time loop, Anaïs must take control of her own fate and stop the attack before it happens. But the court’s gilded surface belies a rotten core, full of restless nobles grabbing at power, discontented commoners itching for revolution, and even royals who secretly dream of taking the throne. It’s up to Anaïs to untangle these knots of deadly deceptions . . . if she can survive past midnight."

I got this book in my most recent YA book subscription box. Unpacked the box, got one look at the book in all its beautiful-cover-gold-gilt-edged glory, skimmed the included letter from the author, and immediately sat down and started reading. Cinderella, but with explosions and murder and coups and stuff? Sign me up! Not sure I've ever gone from knowing nothing about a book to needing to read it this quickly before. 

Anais has a bit of blood magic, inherited from her father's side of the family, but other than that she is...just a young woman. She isn't a super hero, adventurer, powerful mage, what have you. She's a teenager whose mom made her go to a party, and now she's caught in a time loop trying to save the country that colonized her home. 

In this impossible position, she cycles through some pretty understandable emotions - sometimes she's energized, excited by a good idea, ready to stop the loop. Others she's discouraged, hopeless, ready to give up. Through it all, she never gives up, even when some of the people she manages to convince to help her (the prince among them) point out that she has every reason to be okay with the royal family and all the nobility at the palace being left to suffer their fate. 

She knows no one could blame her for dusting her hands off and bailing on a problem that is not hers, but she is also the only one who knows what is about to happen each time the loop resets and, therefore, the only one who can do anything about it. She feels duty-bound to fix things, and she won't stop trying until she's exhausted every option. She's an amazing main character, and I loved her immediately. 

If there was anything I would change about this book, it would be that Anais wasn't alone in her awareness of the time loop. I get the decision, and it makes sense, but without spoilers at some point it gets hard to reconcile the level of...connection, for lack of a better word?...between the characters when for one of them there is endless history of interactions and for the other there is a few hours. It's fine, it ultimately works out okay, but I'm intrigued by what might have been if Anais had found some magical way to bring someone else into her loop and have a partner she didn't have to re-convince to help her every night. Were I to write a fan fiction inspired by this, that's what I would write.