When the World Tips Over – Past Midnight Book Reviews & More

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Title: When the World Tips Over

Author: Jandy Nelson

Format: eBook (NetGalley)

Pages: 528

Publication Date: 9/24/24

Publisher: Dial Books

Categories: Young Adult, Mental Health, Contemporary, Magical Realism, LGBT+, Family

Disclaimer: **I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Thank you to Dial Books for giving me a chance to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

An explosive new novel brimming with love, secrets, and enchantment

The Fall siblings live in hot Northern California wine country, where the sun pours out of the sky, and the devil winds blow so hard they whip the sense right out of your head.

Years ago, the Fall kids’ father mysteriously disappeared, cracking the family into pieces. Now Dizzy Fall, age twelve, bakes cakes, sees spirits, and wishes she were a heroine of a romance novel. Miles Fall, seventeen, brainiac, athlete, and dog-whisperer, is a raving beauty, but also lost, and desperate to meet the kind of guy he dreams of. And Wynton Fall, nineteen, who raises the temperature of a room just by entering it, is a virtuoso violinist set on a crash course for fame . . . or self-destruction.

Then an enigmatic rainbow-haired girl shows up, tipping the Falls’ world over. She might be an angel. Or a saint. Or an ordinary girl. Somehow, she is vital to each of them. But before anyone can figure out who she is, catastrophe strikes, leaving the Falls more broken than ever. And more desperate to be whole.

With road trips, rivalries, family curses, love stories within love stories within love stories, and sorrows and joys passed from generation to generation, this is the intricate, luminous tale of a family’s complicated past and present. And only in telling their stories can they hope to rewrite their futures.

Content Warning: family trauma, family secrets, parental abandonment, parental neglect, sexual assault, profanity

The last time I read a Jandy Nelson book was 10 years ago when she published I’ll Give You the Sun and I loved it. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one but I knew it would be emotional. Here are my thoughts:

Likes:

The characters are so unique! Dizzy, Miles and Wynton are siblings and dealing with their dad leaving them years ago in very different ways. Cassidy who is living the nomad life with her mother who has some mental health issues that she doesn’t quite understand. Each one of them has a different story to tell and a different journey. I like how real each one of them are.
I think the characters that stood out most to me in this book was Cassidy and Miles. Cassidy’s story is really touching, scary, but touching. Miles is the perfect son, but he’s hiding his true self, and he has a dog that he can communicate with mentally!
This story is made up of so many stories – but one emerges in the second half and it’s the story of Bernadette who is the mother of Dizzy and the two boys. It’s intense.
One thing this book does is make you feel all kinds of emotions – especially in the second half of the story when truths are exposed.

Dislikes:

It was hard for me to get into this story because there are so many characters, and also so many stories. Each character is telling their story and in their own way, then midway into the book there is the story about the Fall ancestors. It was a little too much for me and felt too long.
I struggled with the pacing. When it was Cassidy’s POV, I felt immersed and steady in the story but when it was the other POV’s I was thrown off and there are letters too. I think the whole story was choppy which kind of works because this story is a wild, emotional ride, but it was also frustrating.

Final Thoughts:

I had a hard time rating this book because I struggled in the first part of it but I pushed through and I found some of this story really raw and compelling, especially Cassidy’s. This book is emotional. It’s a book that’s hard to describe but has everything from romance, to magic, to family drama, trauma and secrets. I wish the pacing was better and it was a little long. I don’t think I loved it the way I loved I’ll Give You the Sun but it’s definitely a memorable story and I actually think this would be actually great as a tv series because the characters are so compelling. Overall, this is a compelling read.