Nightfall

Jake Halpern & Peter Kujawinski

- 4.6 • 21 Ratings

- $7.99

- $7.99

The dark will bring your worst nightmares to light in this gripping and eerie survival story, perfect for fans of James Dashner and Neil Gaiman.

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 and the shadows are growing long.

Because sunset triggers the tide to roll out hundreds of miles, the islanders are frantically preparing to sail south, where they will wait out the long Night.

Marin and her twin brother, Kana, help their anxious parents ready the house for departure. Locks must be taken off doors. Furniture must be arranged. Tables must be set. The rituals are puzzling—bizarre, even—but none of the adults in town will discuss why it has to be done this way.

Just as the ships are about to sail, a teenage boy goes missing—the twins’ friend Line. Marin and Kana are the only ones who know the truth about where Line’s gone, and the only way to rescue him is by doing it themselves. But Night is falling. Their island is changing.

And it may already be too late.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SEP 7, 2015

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.

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