Finance ✦ Penny’s Take
Midnight in a Perfect Life
Michael Collins · 2010
73/100
👍 Worth It
Michael Collins writes a particular kind of claustrophobic literary fiction that is unafraid to sit inside a man's mid-life failure for three hundred pages, and 'Midnight in a Perfect Life' does that with real intelligence — the Deauville award and the Globe and Mail's 'glitters memorably' are not throwaway endorsements. The plotting weakness is real and the darkness is unrelenting, so readers need to arrive with appetite for that register. But for fans of Colm Toibin-style quiet devastation crossed with financial anxiety, this delivers.
✦ Penny’s Take — this is The Review Group’s own editorial assessment. Penny’s analytical review line researched this book from real sources and scored it across the lenses shown below. It’s an honest first-party read — not a page-by-page personal one. The gold ✓ Penny Tested mark is reserved for books Penny reads cover to cover herself.
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Show the math
Verdict receipt0–100
safety72
substance78
craft76
originality72
accuracy80
hype58
age-fit65
human-eye75
Penny’s verdict73
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