I thoroughly enjoyed reading Midnight at the Houdini. It is definitely a book that tells a lot about its characters, rather than showing, and at points, the genre-defining subtext is written into text, but partially because of that, I found the book charming. While the reader is told that Anna is type-A and a control freak, when she is dropped into the world of the Houdini, she is flexible and open to learning how the world works with a few breaks for panicking when she can't figure out the logic system behind the magic. I had read a few critiques about how the book read more as middle grade with the antagonists being one-dimensional and greedy. While that was true to an extent, I think Phoebe was well characterized as a scorned person, harmed by the people she should have been able to trust, and then warped by a decade and a half of living in a magical world under her control, she oscillates pretty hard between dictator lite and victim at the end of the book. I took Tony and Sebastian's seeming insanity and descent into villainy, when paired with Daniel's spike in concern for his daughter to be the intoxication of hotel (plus sleep deprivation) playing up the most prominent characteristic of each man. While he's described as someone who only cares about business by Anna, she's 16 and has already been proven to be an unreliable narrator. The ending did, however, feel very middle grade, but that's not a bad thing. I find middle grade novels to require a level of creativity when forced to build stories that don't contain the level of romance allowed and/or expected in young adult novels. I thought the ending as it related to Anna and Max's relationship was satisfying. The redemption of Anna's father and the rekindling of their relationship beyond the perfunctory one she'd perceived and allowed was heartwarming.

My main critique of the ending is Anna's near complete lack of panic for the possibility that she killed three men with her wish. Sure, they were nasty, but most of the book was about showing the dynamic and round nature of humanity in forcing Anna, her father, Max, and Phoebe out of their comfortable roles. In the context of her perfectionism, it feels odd that she would be okay with three men, two of whom she knew her whole life, dying because of her.