Midnight Feast

by Martina Evans

Midnight Feast is the dark and funny story of love in a convent boarding school. When sixteen year-old Grace arrives at Mayo, she immediately falls for the mercurial and glamorously thin Colette MacSweeney. She soon finds herself descending with Colette into life-threatening anorexia, entangled in the dysfunction that seethes below the surface of Colette’s family.

Genres: Young Adult, LGBT, Mental Health, Boarding School, Fiction

243 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 3, 1996

About the author

Martina Evans is an Irish poet and novelist living in London. The youngest of ten children, she grew up in a small village in County Cork in a pub, shop and petrol station.
She is the author of three published novels, the first novel Midnight Feast (Sinclair-Stevenson 1996) which won a Betty Trask Award, The Glass Mountain (Sinclair-Stevenson 1997) and No Drinking, No Doctors, No Dancing (Bloomsbury 2000) which won an Arts Council of England Award .
She also the author of four collections of poetry, including Facing the Public 2009 which was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2009 and won the Piero Ciampi International Poetry Prize in 2011. Her latest book , Petrol was published by Anvil Press in 2012.

Reviews

[Cora Tea Party Princess · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 Words: School, friendship, family, anorexia, sexuality.

This is one of those books that always, always sticks in my head. The author has a very distinct style of writing that I've never quite seen before, and I always get sucked right into the story.

I loved how Grace is so unsure about her sexuality, how easily led she was at times.

And I loved the heartbreaking ending.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A harrowing novel about two girls suffering from eating disorders in the confines of a convent school in Mayo in the 1970s. An accomplished piece of writing -- it's interesting to see how Martina Evans' established her voice at such an early point in her career. At times I can almost read these as prose poems.

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

So here we have a girl at a Catholic boarding school in Ireland. Her self-pitying mother is not of much use, the nuns are by and large unsympathetic, and the other students are mostly sketches.

But then we get Colette. She is, for much of the book, Grace's only close friend and confidante. She's creative, perhaps compulsive, the type of person whose flame sucks most of the air out of the room. She is also manipulative, and jealous, and ill.

Few of the characters are particularly likable much of the time. They're too wrapped up in their own teenage worlds -- or, in the case of the nuns, perhaps too busy being unhappy with the teaching they have been tasked with. Colette in particular I would have expected to be more sympathetic, yet from the very beginning Grace is torn between frustration with Colette's antics and desperately seeking her approval. (No lie: it's much more interesting that way.) Their relationship, even setting aside the sexual experimentation (not sure how else to describe it) is often codependent, unhealthy.

But there are a number of very interesting choices. It's published in the 90s but set in the 70s, which I suspect reflects a desire to portray a now (hopefully) outdated form of convent school. Colette's brother throws a wrench into queer themes, but he does so without his participation or knowledge. And then there's the way Colette's anorexia/bulimia is finally resolved -- no spoilers, but it's a different treatment of the topic than I usually find in fiction, and not an improbable one. Keeps things nice and complicated.

[Selkie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was marketed under the subject of eating disorders, but it is not so much about that as the lesbian fixation that the main character has on a girl at the same private school. She then develops a crush on the girl's brother as well, but grows disenchanted with him after finding out that he is mentally unbalanced & institutionalized.
A quick read, but not highly recommended.

[Aedin · Rating 3 out of 5]

took me ages to find a copy !!!
very heavy on ED’s as a warning
i’ve found myself thinking of it a lot since i finished it, and typically that’s when i know a book has made an impact on me. i do feel a fondness for grace and miss being in her head, and seeing the world how she did

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another Irish purchase. Anorexia in a girls' school.

[Monisha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm actually disappointed in this. I wasn't expecting much going into this. I was still disappointed.

The writing is subpar, and it gave me a headache reading it. The jumps and time skips and such were far from smooth. The dialogue wasn't all that realistic. And the worst of it was that the plot just kind of meanders on. It was just... bland. Probably because it is impossible to connect with any of the characters, to care about them, to become invested in them. I just didn't care. And that ending? Seriously?

This whole thing was a hot mess.