WOMS: Marry Me by Midnight

This historical romance has been on my TBR list for a while; since the moment I saw a hunky kippah-wearing man on the front cover. I don’t know about you, but most of the time, I forget what’s even on my TBR. I’m so glad I remembered this gem and actually picked it up to read because it was so much more than I expected.

This week, it’s Felicia Grossman’s Marry Me by Midnight, a Jewish gender-swapped retelling of Cinderella.

Similar to Jean Meltzer’s Jewish pride and joy in her romcoms, Grossman achieves a rich milestone for Jewish literature where we take the foreground as the heroes and heroines in our own fairy tale romance, where we secure our own happy endings, where it is our success that graces every page.

In this first installment of Grossman’s Once Upon the East End series, we find a young heiress scheming her way towards a marriage of convenience which will help secure her place in her late father’s business. With every move his business partners make, she feels they are forcing her out. She must answer their threats with a suitable engagement by Shavuot. Except her potential suitors might not be the trustworthy men they portray themselves as. That’s the only reason she hires the local shul’s custodian, Aaron, to help dig up any dirt on the candidates. It has nothing to do with the way his shirt hugs his shoulders or the way he secretly tells stories to the children and distributes candy. Nope, and definitely not the way he looks at her either with heat in his gaze. Isabelle has her priorities straight, or so she thinks.

Aaron knew Isabelle would be trouble the moment he agreed to her hairbrained scheme, but the connection he felt when they met only deepen with his employment. He found value in his work before, so Isabelle’s attention and respect, nor the dignified way she treats him as her intellectual equal, have nothing to do with it.

As their collaboration continues, neither can resist the bond between them nor its strength. They succumb to their desires, despite the consequences, but both know their arrangement cannot last. Can they end their fleeting passion by the stroke of midnight?

For those of us who remember and adore the historical Cinderella retelling in the film Ever After, then Marry Me by Midnight will feel extremely similar even if it’s a few hundred years later, and in England not France. This romance even felt like a Jewish Disney Princess, albeit an adult Disney Princess romance, with those same magical Ever After vibes. Grossman elegantly wove threads of the familiar fairy tale and its many iterations into story without being too forceful (or maybe I just want a Disney Jewish Princess so much I didn’t care to notice).

Swapping the gender roles to having the Cinderella figure be Aaron was also wonderful because so often I think men believe they have to be accomplished or successful, if not utterly flawless, to be worthy of a woman they love. I won’t speak for all of womankind, but for me, as a married woman, all I have ever needed was someone kind to cherish me. I don’t need perfection. I don’t even need success. I need authenticity.

I think Aaron’s character exemplifies this with acute discretion and magnetism in equal parts. They both do, in a way, as they each find what they truly needed all along—happiness and worth—as individuals. Though each helped the other discover it, their shared love enhances the truth the come to understand about themselves.

The historical context, too, is a timeless commentary on the struggle to be accepted by regimes and powers outside our own community in the name of survival. Its relevance still resonates today, especially in our current situation as we begin to feel the tension rising in society around us.

If you want a familiar escape in the form of a fairy tale retelling, then you can’t go wrong with Felicia Grossman’s Marry Me by Midnight. It might be a bit naughty sometimes, but don’t let that fool you from being enchanted by its charm and magic.

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