The Midnight Girls Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A wintry, Polish-folklore rivals-to-lovers fantasy about two heart-stealing monster girls, with a premise and setting readers adore, held back by a slow first act, a romance some find cold and an ending that wraps up too fast.

Best for: Readers who want villainous heroines, a snowbound carnival setting and a sapphic rivalry with teeth, and who can forgive thin characterisation and a hurried final act.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — young adult, kisses only; no romance.io band)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.76 Goodreads average across roughly 6,600 ratings, with a quiet but consistent complaint about pacing and a thin romance)

Tropes: Rivals-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, villain protagonists, morally grey heroines, dual POV, witches’ apprentices, competition for a prize, folklore-inspired fantasy, winter festival, m/m side romance.

The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska is a standalone young adult sapphic fantasy from Sourcebooks Fire, set in a snowbound, Polish-inspired kingdom in the middle of Karnawał, where Marynka, servant to the witch of midday, finally comes face to face with Zosia, the midnight servant who has been beating her to princely hearts for years — at the exact moment both are sent after the same prince.

Since its December 2021 release it has collected a 3.76 average across roughly 6,600 Goodreads ratings, a starred Publishers Weekly review and warm notices from Kirkus, Booklist and the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. It also drew a School Library Journal review that names the same weaknesses the readers keep naming. Both halves of that record are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Midnight Girls About?

The Midnight Girls is folklore fantasy first and enemies-to-lovers romance a close second, built on Polish and wider Slavic fairy-tale material — witches tied to the hours of the day, hearts as currency, a winter carnival as cover for something predatory. One reviewer places the flavour somewhere near eighteenth-century Poland. It is young adult, marketed for ages 14 to 18, which shapes how the romance is written: tension, banter and kisses rather than anything explicit.

Marynka is the servant of the midday witch, and what she lacks is a win — for years an unseen rival she calls Midnight has reached the prize first. Zosia is that rival, servant to the midnight witch, and what she assumes is that she will keep winning and eventually buy her way out. The book alternates between the two girls, so you see the competition from both sides; a third servant, Beata, the morning girl, sits slightly outside it. The dual POV is meant to sharpen the rivalry, though at least one blogger found the two voices hard to tell apart.

What Makes This Sapphic YA Folklore Fantasy Work

The setting: The Polish-inspired winter carnival is the most praised element by a distance — it comes up in the clear majority of the most-read English reviews, with the food, the festival rituals and the snow named again and again.
Monstrous heroines: Readers who love this book love it because the leads are genuinely bad. They steal hearts for their mistresses, and the book does not apologise for them; morally grey and villainous are the recurring words.
The rivalry before the romance: Years of competing at a distance give the first meeting a charge. Several trade reviews single out the slow-building attraction between the two servants as the book’s best quality.
The folklore engine: Magic drawn from the hours of the day, three servants for three witches, hearts as power — bloggers praise how distinctive the system feels next to standard YA fantasy.
A self-contained story: It is a true standalone. Nothing is held back for a sequel, and readers single out the epilogue.

Book Synopsis

The witches of midday and midnight run on hearts, and it is their servants who go out and collect them. Marynka serves the witch of midday. She is good at the work — quick, vicious, loyal — but she has spent years arriving a moment too late, because somewhere out there a girl she has never seen keeps taking the best heart first. Marynka calls her Midnight, and the rivalry has become the most important relationship in her life.

This year the target is Prince Józef, a young royal whose heart is supposed to be pure enough to make any witch formidable. The city is lit up for Karnawał, the masked season of dances and feasting before Lent, and the prince’s court is full of people with motives of their own, including a former best friend turned enemy whose history with Józef is far from settled. Marynka goes in with a plan. So does Zosia, servant of the midnight witch, who has her own reason for wanting this heart badly: it might be the last one she ever has to take.

When the two girls finally meet in human form, the hostility they built at a distance does not behave the way either of them expected. Every move against the prince becomes a move against each other, and every move against each other drifts closer to something neither of them has words for. Meanwhile their escalating attempts on the prince are drawing the city’s attention. Someone is going to lose the prince. The question is what the girls are prepared to lose to stop it being them.

My Review

The premise is the best thing here, and I want to say it plainly because the rest of this section is about what the book does with it. Two monster girls who have hated each other for years without ever meeting, sent to steal the same prince’s heart during a winter carnival — that is a premise readers praise even in their two-star reviews, and it is easy to see why. Jasinska gives it a real world to live in. The Polish-inspired kingdom, the food, the snow and the masked festival season are what readers name first when they recommend the book.

The second strength is nerve. Marynka and Zosia are not secretly sweet girls in villain costumes; they kill people and take their hearts, and the book lets that stand. For the readers who connect with it, that is the whole appeal, and StoryGraph’s crowd data backs them — 74% say character flaws are a main focus, and 73% still call the characters loveable.

Where it struggles is momentum and depth, and this is not one cranky reviewer — it is the consistent thread through the low-star reviews. Around eleven independent reviewers across the one- and two-star pages call the first third slow or boring, and several say they gave up or nearly did. The romance is the second theme: roughly a dozen low-star readers say it is underdeveloped, forced or short on chemistry, which matches School Library Journal’s observation that the brutal dynamic often leaves the main romance cold. Around ten flag the prose as juvenile or repetitive. And the ending is the fourth: readers who otherwise liked the book describe the final act as rushed and the resolution as convenient. These complaints come from a small minority — just 7% of Goodreads ratings are one or two stars — but the 28% three-star block suggests a lot of readers felt the same pull without being bothered enough to say so.

One expectation to reset: the cover, the trade quotes and the Killing Eve comparison sell this as a sapphic romance with murderous edge. Readers mostly experience a folklore fantasy with a romance growing slowly inside it, and a heat level that never gets past kissing. If the romance is what drew you, calibrate. If the dark premise is what worried you, the violence is real — StoryGraph users rate it graphic — but the tone is fairy tale, not horror.

My honest note: A five-star premise and setting delivered with three-star pacing and a romance that never quite catches fire. If you read for atmosphere and monstrous girls, this rewards you; if you need the love story to carry the book, expect to wait for it.

Element	In The Midnight Girls
Central relationship	Marynka & Zosia — rival servants of the midday and midnight witches, rivals-to-lovers
Core tropes	Rivals-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, villain protagonists, dual POV, competition for a prize, folklore fantasy
Setting	A Polish-inspired kingdom during Karnawał, the winter carnival season
Heat level	2/5 — young adult, kisses only, no sex on page
Series	Standalone — complete story, hopeful ending, no sequel
Content notes	Graphic violence, death and blood; emotional, physical and child abuse; minor references to war, abandonment and suicide

How Dark and Spicy Is The Midnight Girls?

A 2/5 for heat. romance.io has no entry for the book, which is normal for young adult titles and tells you it is not being catalogued as adult romance at all. The number comes from the publisher’s 14 to 18 age range and from what readers report: charged scenes and kisses, nothing beyond that, and one blog review tags it outright as having no sex.

The darkness is the bigger question. StoryGraph’s community warnings rate violence, death and blood as graphic and list emotional, physical and child abuse at a moderate level; one blogger flags body horror, and another found the violence hard to read. One low-star reviewer argues the abuse theme gets sacrificed to the romance — a single voice, but a pointed one. If you want YA sapphic fantasy at the same heat, Of Fire and Stars and Girls of Paper and Fire sit in the same 2/5 band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a folklore setting you can almost taste, you like your heroines monstrous and unapologetic, you enjoy rivals who circle each other for a long time before anything happens, and you are happy with a YA heat level.

You may want to skip it if: a slow opening loses you, you need deep characterisation for both leads, you want the romance front and centre with real chemistry from early on, or a rushed final act spoils a book for you.

In short: a gorgeous, wicked premise in a beautiful setting, carried by atmosphere more than by its love story.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

Nothing is driving new readers to this book right now — it is a 2021 backlist title with no viral moment and no organic BookTok footprint that I could find, and I could not reach Reddit to check its discussion there. What it has instead is a long, steady record: roughly 6,600 Goodreads ratings, a 3.82 average across 2,567 StoryGraph reviews, and a 4.2 on Amazon across 252 ratings. Some of the early enthusiasm came from advance readers — five of the sixteen English reviews at the top of Goodreads mention an advance copy — but that is diluted across five years of ratings. There is also an unabridged audiobook from Tantor Media, narrated by Emily Ellet and running about 8 hours 43 minutes.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The monstrous heroines, first and almost universally — fourteen of the sixteen top English reviews dwell on the girls being villains, and “morally grey” is the recurring phrase. Then the setting: the Polish and Slavic folklore, the winter festival and the food, which even the two-star reviewers praise. The rivalry comes next, with the cat-and-mouse dynamic singled out by bloggers. The side romance between Prince Józef and his former friend gets its own fans, and School Library Journal agrees it is sometimes the more compelling of the two.

What readers argue about and complain about: The slow start, above everything. Around eleven low-star reviewers call the opening slow, boring or monotonous, and the did-not-finish reports I found stop in the first half. The romance is the second theme — roughly a dozen say it is underdeveloped, forced or lacking chemistry, and one reviewer who came for the sapphic romance says it amounted to barely a chapter. Third: the writing, which about ten reviewers call juvenile, middle grade in feel, or repetitive. Fourth: the ending, described as rushed or ill-defined by readers on both sides of the rating split and by School Library Journal, which notes the lack of closure. Beyond that, a few readers simply could not invest in leads this cruel — taste, not craft, since the same quality is the book’s main draw. At least one Polish reader wished the partition-era history were more than backdrop, while others call the setting the best part.

The trade coverage is worth a sentence of its own. Publishers Weekly starred it and Kirkus, Booklist, the Bulletin and Tor.com were all positive, without mentioning the pacing problem readers keep raising. School Library Journal is the exception. Its review reached the same verdict as the low-star readers — a cold central romance and an unfinished-feeling ending — and when a trade reviewer and the reader minority land on the same flaw independently, that flaw is real.

The standalone question worth asking first: this one is complete. There is no sequel, and none is announced; a couple of reviewers hoped for a companion book about Beata, but nothing has followed. If you want more Jasinska, the numbers point forward rather than back. Her debut, The Dark Tide, sits at 3.42 across about 9,200 Goodreads ratings, and the two reviewers who compare the books split on which is better. This Fatal Kiss, the first Spirits and Saints book, rates 3.98 across about 4,900, with its sequel listed for 2027.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Midnight Girls a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete story with no sequel and none announced. Jasinska’s newer series, Spirits and Saints, is unrelated.

How spicy is The Midnight Girls?

A 2/5. It is young adult, aimed at ages 14 to 18, and the romance stays at kissing with no sex on the page. romance.io has no entry for it, which is usual for YA.

Does The Midnight Girls have a happy ending?

A hopeful one rather than a firm happily-ever-after. Readers like the epilogue for Marynka and Zosia, but several readers and School Library Journal say the resolution feels rushed and short on closure.

Is The Midnight Girls too dark for teens?

It is dark but pitched at teens. StoryGraph readers rate the violence, death and blood as graphic and flag emotional, physical and child abuse, so check those warnings first. The tone is fairy tale rather than horror.

Is there an audiobook of The Midnight Girls?

Yes. Tantor Media published an unabridged edition narrated by Emily Ellet, running about 8 hours 43 minutes.

If You Loved The Midnight Girls, Read These Next

If the rivalry is the draw, Crier’s War runs a YA enemies-to-lovers plot where one girl is sent to kill the other. If you want the same mix of dark palace politics, violence and slow-building sapphic romance at YA heat, Girls of Paper and Fire is the closest match. And if witches and morally messy girls are what you came for, The Scapegracers swaps the fairy-tale kingdom for a contemporary coven.

For more in this register, browse our full list of YA sapphic fantasy books or the complete Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Midnight Girls is a book whose premise outruns its execution. The Polish-inspired winter carnival is a genuinely lovely setting, the monstrous heroines are refreshingly unrepentant, and the rivalry gives the first meeting real charge. It is also slow to get going, light on chemistry once the romance arrives, and hurried in its final act. Whether that trade works depends on what you read fantasy for — but the reader who came for atmosphere and wicked girls gets a complete, self-contained story with a hopeful ending. Check The Midnight Girls on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Midnight Girls ranks as an atmospheric YA sapphic folklore fantasy — rich in setting and wicked in spirit, held back by pacing and a thin central romance, and best approached for the world and the villainous girls rather than the love story.