Book Buzz: Midnight Manor by Sid Sharp
“I’m drawn to mischief and mystery, the sense of something strange and eerie going on. I sort of wish that I could make children’s books as genuinely frightening and funny as R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps, but I can’t be serious enough to make something deeply terrifying. I go for that, and silliness naturally comes out in the process.”
― Sid Sharp, Interview, Publishers Weekly
What booksellers are saying about Midnight Manor
- Kids are going to grow up and say, “remember that bedtime book you would read me about the weird, spooky creatures in different rooms of a mansion?” Sid Sharp is a genius. The aesthetics are inimitable, and they’ll leave an impression.
― Ryan, Dad Suggests Books, Fayetteville, Arkansas | BUY
- What a funny, silly bedtime book! Makes the Halloween monsters endearing not scary. love the Good night moon reference!
― Jean, Thornwell Books, Morganton, North Carolina | BUY
- This one is for all the littles and their bigs who dream of gossiping with gargoyles or gardening with ghouls. Simultaneously a wild rumpus and a quiet night in a great green room, it’s the ‘going to bed’ book for a post Halloween, sugared up nighttime routine.
― Michelle, Cavalier House Books, Denham Springs, Louisiana | BUY
- Packed with alliteration and evocative vocabulary, this is a must for Halloween or anytime! Sid Sharp creates such unique worlds that appeal to kids and adults alike. Midnight Manor is for anyone who loves spooky season and anyone who loves to see offbeat details in a book.
― Johanna, McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro, North Carolina | BUY
About Sid Sharp
Sid Sharp is an Eisner-nominated author, illustrator, and bookseller of uncommon books. Their first book, The Wolf Suit, was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and has been translated into eight languages. Its beloved companion, Bog Myrtle, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Sid has been nominated for the German Youth Literature Prize and has been named a 2026 Sendak Fellow. Sid lives in Toronto, Ontario.
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“I think, like all my projects, it was not just one thing [that started this project]. It was a few things. The obvious one and the fastest answer would be I fell in love with a dog. I have a dog who’s 12 years old now. His name is Oscar. My first dog ever, I never had a dog growing up. I know a lot of people who have animals, and they talk to their dogs. I’ll wake up, and I’ll hear my wife, Laura [van den Berg], talking, and I’ll think she’s on the phone or something. And then I realize she’s just talking to Oscar. But I never talked to him out loud, and I still don’t. Other than basic commands, it’s this silent communication, almost like telepathy or something like that, or imagined telepathy. I spent a lot of time thinking about what his voice would sound like. At the same time, over the past few years as we experience the world, read about the world, open up the newsfeed and all that, there’s been a feeling like I’m exhausted by humanity. Exhausted by humans. I say this a little bit jokingly, but I think I just needed a break from humans.
” 
“In December 2017, I was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping in a mall in Miami. I was about to leave when I heard some pops over a loudspeaker. People around me started running, screaming, crying. We thought we were in a mass shooting. It turned out to be a hoax. Before I knew it wasn’t real, I ran with the crowd and hid behind a bush, where I pondered my whole life. 
“I was visiting a bookstore when I dreamed up the opening lines to The Great Wherever. I was standing in my favorite sections―literary fiction―browsing backlist titles and delighting at how some of my longtime favorites blended the modern and hyper-realistic with unexpected elements of the supernatural. I’d been noodling over a novel for years by then, and suddenly―as if a key had turned in a lock―one began writing itself on the journal in my mind. First came the opening words, and then a sudden revelation: A ghost should tell this story.” 
“Sometimes a story blows through your heart like a strong wind. That’s how it felt writing Habits of the Sea.
It haunted my sleep and prodded at me when I was awake. I had no other choice but to write it. It’s not my story. It belongs to someone else. Someone from long ago. Another timeline. Another life. One, I suspect, I’ll never fully understand.” 
“I’ve always really been fascinated in maps and the idea of mapping and the impulse to map. I think it is a real human instinct to do it. It actually – as humans, it predates our ability to write. You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age map on the walls of a cave in what’s now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedolina. And somebody at some point was filled with the urge to draw, to scratch into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home – their fields and huts and their sort of town, I suppose you would call it. And it’s just such an interesting representation of the urge to say, this is who I am. This is where I am. But of course, you fast-forward a – say, a thousand years or so and you get to the Roman Empire. And from that point on, it’s impossible to disentangle the urge to map from the urge to possess, the – from colonialism.” 
“I think that we certainly talk about pregnancy and motherhood and reproductive freedoms. These are conversations that we are having, but within pretty narrow parameters. And what I liked about this idea was the opportunity to talk about some of those issues from a different lens than usual — not least because so many people’s minds are already made up about so many of these ideas, and that means that we can’t really have a conversation. But if we change the lens, if we change the approach, if we change the givens and the parameters that we go in with, then we get to have a conversation.
“One of the things that really interested me was the parents investigating their son’s death. He goes off the balcony of this luxury building into the Thames. It’s unclear, is this a suicide? Is it murder? Is it something more exotic? The parents trust Scotland Yard to get to the bottom of it, but then there’s this gradual awareness that the police aren’t actually going to come and help. So they have to try and work it out themselves. That was really interesting to me as a dynamic. They’re incredibly invested, but they also get pulled into this underworld in London inside the city they hadn’t known.” 
“I thought about setting the historical timeline before the Meiji Restoration, when the samurai still would have had social standing and power. But ultimately, I liked the idea of Sen’s family desperately clinging to the past glory of the samurai, because desperate characters do irrational things. I also liked that because Sen’s father essentially wants to start a whole new samurai rebellion from scratch. The stakes feel much more like a personal vendetta than a political movement. I think this decision fit better with the story I was trying to tell — I’m more interested in talking about the mistakes of one family who happened to be samurai rather than commenting on the samurai at large.” 
“When I sat down to write this novel, it ended up going in a completely different direction than what I had intended. I’d originally wanted to write an unrequited love story. As I was writing the first few scenes, I was like, “Oh, these people actually both love each other, so that’s not working. Also, I really feel the need to explore how this character has come to love in this way, and to deny herself love in this way.
Julia Langbein says that the inspiration for her new novel, Dear Monica Lewinsky, came to her during a visit to the house where she grew up: “I had to go clear out my old childhood bedroom, and I found a diary from 1998 in which I had been disparaging of Monica Lewinsky in a way that was just very casual and normal for people at that time…It was this moment of compunction — we all recognize we had it wrong — but the writer in me was like, You’re picking up on some idea of Monica Lewinsky as a kind of saint whose public life completely fits with the stories of the early martyrs.” 
I know a lot of fairy tales.
Like I cut my teeth on them. I grew up reading lots of fairy tale collections, and I realized I could only with difficulty think of fairytales where women were friends, where women talk to each other, and where they weren’t antagonists to each other in some way. I know they’re there, but the fact that I could reach for 10 stories of women waiting for rescue or women waiting to be chosen or women seeking husbands or, you know, that sort of thing instead of a story of women setting out together to have adventures—which is really what I wanted to tell my 7 year old niece who is asking me for a fairy tale— It was very disturbing to me, and I just remember in that moment thinking I’m just going to make something up. I’m gonna make something up because I really want her to know that there is room in fairytales for girls to be friends.
I hope I don’t give too much away, but I was quite inspired by Witness, with Harrison Ford amongst the Amish. I was really interested in this idea of a gangster amongst peacemakers, which is really what Witness is. I find that really fascinating. I became interested in Celtic Christianity because it was very revolutionary at the time in ways that we slightly forget. This was a world of utter warlordism, a very, very violent world and it was pagan. All of that was predicated on the idea that it was good to be strong and kill people. If gods were with you, that’s what would happen. If gods weren’t with you, you’d be weak. The idea of a religion that was founded on the idea that you might want to be weak, or you might want to be humble, was completely insane to these people. I mean, they looked at it and just went, “You’re mad! What are you talking about?”
“Why was Anne Boleyn executed? This was a question I asked myself when writing The Beheading Game, in which Anne Boleyn wakes up after her own execution, escapes from her grave in the Tower of London, sews her head back on, and goes on a revenge quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry his next wife, Jane Seymour. Legally, the answer is she was executed because she was convicted of the crimes of treason, adultery and incest, but most historians today agree those charges were probably false. So, how did Anne go from being a queen consort, steps from the seat of English power, to climbing the steps to the scaffold in a matter of months? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely, and, although I came to many answers to this question during my research, all of them circled around one central theme: misogyny.”
