After splitting up two years earlier to pursue their careers in New York and Los Angeles, exes Camille Buhay and Edward “Ward” Dunbar reunite by chance at a bookstore in London. The old attraction and familiarity they felt for each other is still there and learning they’ve each relocated to the city for work makes them eager to rekindle their romance. However, their respective first days at an antiquities shop take a peculiar turn when they try to leave at the end of their shifts and find themselves locked in. While life in London seems to go on as normal beyond the shop’s impenetrable glass windows, Ward is trapped within the shop in another dimension during the day and Camille is similarly trapped during the night. 

Somehow the couple unwittingly stumbled into a war between opposing eastern and western factions of deities. Along with the elderly shopkeepers who hired them, they’re confined to the premises until they’ve successfully solved a series of puzzles and sided with a faction. Camille and Ward do their best to navigate the immortal and spectral clientele, cryptic employers, slippery time, and physical separation of their bizarre new circumstances. They’re briefly only able to directly communicate for five minutes at a time between their shifts and are forced to rely on favors from the mercurial gods when that ends. Camille and Ward’s mutual desire to get out of the store alive and be together on the other side of this strange experiment sustains them through each obstacle.  

Aside from initial proximity and their shared interest in escape rooms, the two have little in common. Both from Chicago, Ward and Camille met and began dating in college. Handsome, blond, kind, charming, and gregarious, Ward grew up in the security of an affluent white family, likes to see the good in people, and tends to befriend strangers with ease. Beautiful, dark-haired, diligent, introverted, and analytical, Camille comes from a working-class Filipino family and is more wary of people and their intentions. Although their physical attraction and contrasting backgrounds and personalities is nice, a real sense of the strength of their connection is missing. Because the novel begins years after their relationship ended and they spend the majority of the narrative forcefully separated in the immortals’ experiment, so much of their bond is left to sparse, past-tense exposition or fleeting, often mediated, communication. Thus, the reader is often told that these two people should be together but not invited to see why. The reasons behind the celestial war and repercussions of one side winning over another are also vague and brushed aside. 

Camille and Ward’s perspectives shape the story in alternating chapters, with Camille’s chapters told in the first person and Ward’s in third person. The reason for this distinction isn’t entirely clear. It seems like either dual first person or third person POVs would have been more effective. Despite this, Night for Day is an enjoyable, quick-paced read that feels like parts of The Good Place mixed with romance, an existential escape room, and light mythology. 

LOGLINE: Trapped on opposite day and night shifts in a London antiquities shop at the center of a celestial war, ex-lovers Camille and Ward must find a way out of their respective confinements, back to their original timeline, and one another.  

MOOD: An unusual, second-chance, fantasy romance that interestingly uses an otherworldly standoff between warring deities to keep its modern-day leads apart. A light, hopeful, and fast read with touches of heat and mystery.

TITLE: Night for Day

AUTHOR: Roselle Lim

GENRE: Contemporary Fantasy, Romance, Paranormal Fantasy Romance

PUBLISHER: Ace, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group

PUB DATE: 20 February 2024

LENGTH: 352 pages