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The Midnighters Trilogy
by Scott Westerfeld
Midnighters: The Secret Hour
(Atom, £6.99, 304 pages, paperback, this edition published April
2006.)
Midnighters: Touching Darkness
(Atom, £6.99, 306 pages, paperback, first published 2005, this
edition published August 2006.)
Midnighters: Blue Noon
(Atom, £6.99, 352 pages, paperback, this edition published November
2006.)
Review by Gary Couzens
 Fifteen-year-old
Jessica Day, her younger sister Beth and her parents move from Chicago
to Bixby, Oklahoma. Soon after her arrival, Jessica notices something
strange. At midnight time freezes and the "blue time" starts
-- an extra unknown hour of the day that it seems only she is aware
of. But she is wrong. Strange, threatening creatures called darklings
wander around in the blue time, and the town's only defence is a group
of young people known as Midnighters. Rex is a Seer, whose knowledge
of blue-time lore is unparalleled. Melissa can read minds. Maths geek
Dess constructs the weapons they fight the darklings with. Jonathan,
who soon becomes Jessica's boyfriend, is an acrobat, with the ability
to fly and leap great distances. But what strange ability does Jessica
have?
Scott Westerfeld has been a remarkably prolific writer of young-adult
fiction in the last five years or so. In that time he has produced this
trilogy, another science-fictional series (Uglies, Pretties and
Specials), two vampire novels set in New York (Peeps and
The Last Days) and a non-genre satire on "cool hunting"
(So Yesterday). Even granting that as young-adult novels they
will tend to be shorter than adult novels have to be, that's quite some
achievement.
 
Midnighters has the feel of one very long novel split into three.
It has a continuous narrative which covers a span of two months, beginning
with the start of school in early September and reaching its climax
on Halloween Night. The events of the middle volume take place over
just one week.
The Secret Hour brings Jessica to Bixby and deals with her
discovery of the blue time, and of her fellow midnighters. It also lays
down the ground rules: in short, twelves are bad, but thirteens are
good, and the weapons the Midnighters use against the Darklings all
bear tridecalogisms (thirteen-letter words) as names. The book ends
with Jessica discovering what her own special power is.
Book Two, Touching Darkness broadens the premise out. The Midnighters
discover where earlier ones of their kind went, and why they appear
to be the only ones alive. Meanwhile Rex has his own encounter with
the Darklings, which draws him over to their side.
By Book Three, Blue Noon, boundaries are beginning to break
down, heralded by a surprise appearance of the Blue Time in the middle
of the day. This builds up to a massive confrontation between the Midnighters
and the Darklings on Halloween Night, with the fate of the town at stake.
The Midnighters trilogy is an entertaining series that relies on the
interaction between its engaging characters as much as its action setpieces
and its well-worked-out premise. Given the likely audience for much
young-adult fiction, it's the girls who make the more vivid impression:
Jonathan isn't much more than a boyfriend, and Rex -- who has one of
the deepest conflicts of all of them -- tends to be kept at a distance.
On the other hand, Dess (short for Desdemona), the lonely maths geek,
is very engaging, and the sibling rivalry between Jessica and her younger
sister Beth (who soon suspects something is going on with her big sister)
is very well captured. This level of characterisation lifts this series
above the ordinary -- it's a good fast-paced read that, in its semi-downbeat
but open ending, does leave room for more.
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