What We Saw at Night

November 12, 2012
Bestselling author Mitchard launches the Soho Teen imprint with a contemporary thriller whose tension and excitement are tempered by coincidences, near misses, and credulity-stretching assumptions. Sixteen-year-old Allie Kim and her friends Juliet and Rob all suffer from xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a fatal allergy to light. Their shortened lives must be lived in the dark. Luckily, they live in a quiet Lake Superior resort that hosts both rich people and a specialized XP clinic, so everything necessary for an unshackled nightlife is available. At Juliet’s instigation, the trio takes up the acrobatic extreme sport of parkour. When Allie witnesses something disturbing during one of their midnight building-climbing jaunts, and a friend turns up dead, no one believes Allie’s claim that the fault is not with adolescent recklessness, but a blonde sociopath she glimpsed through a window. Atmospheric, melancholy passages, especially at the outset, can be breathtaking, but as the improbable twists mount, subtler emotions are lost to momentary gasps of horror and lingering skepticism. A cliffhanger ending sets up a planned
sequel. Ages 12–up. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents.

February 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-Allie, Rob, and Juliet are Minnesota teens brought together by a forced nighttime existence due to a rare disease. Xeroderma Pigmentosum, or XP, is an extreme sensitivity to UV rays. The briefest exposure to sunlight, or even bright electric lights, can lead to lethal forms of skin cancer and early death. So the three friends, sheltered by day, feel they have little to lose when they can finally break free at night. Juliet, a former competitive skier, is the ringleader. She convinces Allie and Rob to train for Parkour, a discipline of graceful leaps and somersaults used to traverse dangerous terrain and building sites. While practicing on a newly built apartment complex, Allie leaps onto a balcony where she sees a murderer standing over his victim, and, unfortunately, he glances up before she can escape. Allie finds herself fearful for her life, but also determined to find out who the man is and stop him from taking a new victim. A romance between Allie and Rob (which becomes sexual), Allie and Julia's fraught friendship, XP, Parkour, and the intensity of a killer on the loose make this novel an interesting page-turner, and the cliff-hanger ending will have most readers waiting for the next installment.-Cary Frostick, Mary Riley Styles Public Library, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2012
Grades 8-12 Sixteen-year-olds Allie, Rob, and Juliet are the tres compadres. They live in Iron Mountain, Minnesota, where there is a medical center researching the disease that they all have: xeroderma pigmentosum, a severe allergy to the sun. Night is their day. Juliet, the most fearless of the trio, gets them into parkour, an extreme sport that involves scaling structures and leaping off tall buildings. But while out doing stunt dives, Allie thinks she sees a woman being murdered, and a whole new dangerous world is opened, one that keeps Allieand readersguessing until . . . well, even after the book's close, since this turns out to be the beginning of a trilogy. This is problematic because the convoluted plot, which moves in fits and starts, seems to demand some sort of conclusion, at least one that could lead into the next title. Instead, this is more of a cliff-hanger. What does work here is Allie's narrator voice, honest and real, and the fascinating looks at both parkour and a disease so unconventional it turns the lives of patients and their families upside down. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Mitchard's well-known name should be enough to draw a crowd for this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)