Nightfall
Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski
On the island, there are 14 years of light followed by 14 years of night. When the night years come, the villagers leave the island as quickly as they can – but leave everything behind as if there are unknown people returning to their homes. Marin doesn’t understand – but she knows that when Line goes missing she and Kana will have to be the ones to save him from the dark.
Marin! You great idiot. What were you thinking? You caused alllllllll of those issues. And then you wonder why people are mad. I guess you do sort of redeem yourself.
Ooohh, I didn’t see one of the big twists coming. Eeei! I get so excited just remembering back to it. I guess that was the turning point of the novel, and after that the surprises sort of ended, but there was still some movement. Just not as much as I might have desired.
The blurb on this book is great (in comparison to some others I have read lately). It doesn’t give too much away, and it lets the authors build suspense naturally. You really don’t know what is coming next. Honestly, the blurb didn’t make me excited to read it, but then I got stuck in it…
I totally understood the side of the woods’ monsters. And I couldn’t understand why the villagers wanted to come back for the days of light. What’s wrong with living in the desert? It can’t be that bad if you survive 14 years there.
The ending left me lonely and sad, and not knowing what would happen next. What will Kana do? Line and Marin have their lives all good to go (you know, since they are in love and there’s a whole bunch of other things in the way that will be fine), but Kana has nothing.
I’m giving this 4 stars. I found myself unable to put it down. It called to me. It’s not 5 stars though, because now that I know the ending, there is nothing left for me.
There’s not much I can really say here, it is such a tiny little volume. I snaffled it up in around a half-hour. The action is fast-moving, and tries to keep your attention that way. I did drift off at points, but I think that’s just me.
This novel had some fantastic laugh out loud parts that I couldn’t help sharing with my partner. And then she laughed as well. I really enjoyed it for those moments, and the language twists and the sheer absurdity of the fights that take place.
Unbelievable! The number of hidden twists in this is epic, and I have no idea how the author kept them straight. It’s an interesting and relevant novel to these days – both in hiding your tracks and tracking others.
There are some interesting things going on in this novel. If you wait too long after reading something, you lose those things. It’s not that I’ve waited too long, its that I’ve read about 5 books in the mean time. Oops?
Most of us want to hope that we won’t fall for a Con. Who would get into a pyramid scheme? Hell, I was almost pulled into one as a kid, but it didn’t work in Australia because we don’t have $1 notes to post. The deal was that you post $1 to each person on the list, then you add your name to the bottom of the list. Then the more people you send it to, the more you make back. Now it costs a $1 to send the damn letter, so you wouldn’t even break even!
Ah, the ending. It tidied things up nicely. Perhaps too nicely. Worlds never end like that. So it could be unexpected, except the minute a couple of people do their ‘expose’ thing, then it becomes obvious what is happening around that, and it proves to be inevitable. It was already so unpredictable, in its own way it was predictable.
All the characters feel one-dimensional, which is ironic, given that pretty much only 2D things can slip through the current crack used by Elliot and Madeline. I’m sure they could all pass through too!
This novel started so slowly and got so confusing at times that I couldn’t work out what was going on. I struggled to get into it, and found myself easily distracted. Near the end, I was finally hit with a shock of ‘wow’, but it only lasted a couple of pages.
I always wanted more. It wasn’t enough for me that Stephanie’s brother was dead. I wanted the gruesome details. And it wasn’t enough that her mother wept, or that there was something interesting going on in the deal with her grandparents, that we never found out about.