What We Saw at Night
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Like the yearning, doomed young clones in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, three teenagers with XP (a life-threatening allergy to sunlight) are a species unto themselves. As seen through the eyes of 16-year-old Allie Kim, they roam the silent streets, looking for adventure, while others sleep. When Allie's best friend introduces the trio to Parkour, the stunt-sport of running and climbing off forest cliffs and tall buildings (risky in daylight and potentially deadly by darkness), they feel truly alive, equal to the "daytimers."
On a random summer night, while scaling a building like any other, the three happen to peer into an empty apartment and glimpse an older man with what looks like a dead girl. A game of cat-and-mouse ensues that escalates through the underground world of hospital confinement, off-the-grid sports, and forbidden love. Allie, who can never see the light of day, discovers she's the lone key to stopping a human monster.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
