Nightfall
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
After fourteen years of Day, comes fourteen years of Night. Don't get left behind.
On Marin's island, sunrise doesn't come every twenty-four hours - it comes every twenty-eight years. Now the sun is just a sliver of light on the horizon. The weather is turning cold. The shadows are growing long. The dark is rising. And soon it will be Night.
The eerie Evening sunset is causing the tide to begin its slow roll out hundreds of miles, and so Marin, along with her twin brother Kana and the rest of the islanders, must frantically begin preparations to sail south, where they will wait out the long Night.
But first the house must be made ready for their departure. Locks must be taken off doors. Furniture must be arranged just so. Tables must be set as if for dinner. The rituals are bizarre - unnerving, even - but none of the adults will discuss why things must be this way. And then just as the ships are about to sail, the twins' friend Line goes missing. Marin and Kana know where he has gone, and that the only way to rescue him is to do it themselves. And surely the ships will wait?
Because Night is falling. Their island is changing. And something is stirring in the dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Halpern and Kujawinski (coauthors of the Dormia series) have created an intriguing but implausible world for this dark story. After 14 years of Day, Night descends on the island of Bliss. Meanwhile, the receding tide exposes a statue bearing the ominous words, "The houses must be without stain." As is traditional when Night approaches, the islanders prepare to flee to the Desert Lands (where, somehow, Day and Night alternate in three-day shifts) until Bliss's sun returns. When adolescent Marin and her twin brother, Kana, leave the ships to look for her best friend, Line, they become stranded on the island to face the Night: the cold, the dark, strange animals that hide by Day, and the terrifying original inhabitants of Bliss. The extremity of the world and premise requires significant suspension of disbelief (including how "years" are measured on such a planet and why anyone would settle somewhere they must abandon for 14-year spans with other options available). But the authors' lovely wordsmithing, especially in the descriptions of falling night and the rituals of departure, compensate for these and other implausibilities. Ages 12 up.
