TITLE: What We Saw At Night
AUTHOR: Jacquelyn Mitchard
FORMAT: eBook, 218 pages
The world is different at night. Allie and her two closest friends, Rob and Juliet, know this better than anyone. The three all share the same genetic condition: Xeroderma Pigmentosum, a fatal allergy to sunlight. The only world they can truly live in is the one that emerges when the sun goes down. They have been friends forever, banding together against the disease that has every possibility of claiming their lives before they can even begin to truly live. But being unable to tolerate daylight doesn’t prevent the trio from trying to get as much out of life as they possibly can. They explore the streets and unearth buried secrets by the light of the moon, having the run of Iron Harbor from dusk until the last few hours before dawn. But it’s when they take up parkour, a stunt sport involving climbing and vaulting off tall buildings, that the thrill factor hits the ceiling. And it’s because of this need for a thrill that they find themselves witnessing something they shouldn’t have seen, what no Daytimer would ever have known about: murder.
The idea behind this book is, I think, brilliant. It covers rarely explored territory, promises a suspenseful plot. This is why I was drawn to it in the first place. And it isn’t that the plot lacks action or mystery, because it has those things — it just all suffers from poor execution. What We Saw At Night falls victim to a lot of tension that ultimately fizzes out far too soon.
The book does do a fantastic job of giving you an insider’s look at what life is like for a teenager with XP, I think that it captures that with incredible accuracy and a lot of relevance. Allie is a decent heroine who does her share of teenage quibbling but otherwise is very good about not annoying me. Did I find myself wishing she would stick up for herself more, and not just in her head but also out loud? Sure. Did I wonder why on earth she was friends with Juliet (a bitch) and Rob (practically a non-entity) aside from the fact that they all have XP? Absolutely. But she was okay, and she evolves from being reactive to proactive by the end, so I considered her redeemed to an extent.
There were some genuinely creepy moments in this story, moments that had me glancing nervously over my shoulder despite the knowledge that it was all purely fictional. The thing that makes the creepiness work is that the chilling bits could all be very real. The villain is someone who could exist very easily right down the street from you, someone you might even know. If you’ve ever watched a Dateline special, you’ll understand. It’s those small details that scare you, the telltale signs that something isn’t quite right. That someone is following you. That someone is watching your every move, leaving these subtle hints because they know you’re going to find them. They want you to find them. Allie, our protagonist, starts experiencing all these things right after being the only one to pursue the fact that she and her friends probably saw someone get killed. She’s determined to find out what happened, and the killer knows it. It’s terrifying to think that Allie, not quite seventeen, is facing down so much evil essentially on her own. This is a villain who is smart, resourceful, an adept liar, and masquerading as a decent person. He has a respectable job, a well-known family, kids of his own. He’s also a complete sociopath, and he will stop at nothing to make sure Allie never talks.
But the suspense, no matter how good it is, gets mired in choppy narrative and conversations that veer away from the topic way too often. Yes, I realize that normal conversations between normal teenagers (or normal people in general) don’t conform to rigid scripts, but this was really just too much for me. There are inside jokes that are explained after the fact but which leave you feeling more excluded than part of an intimate trio of friends. An intimate trio of friends who, by the way, never managed to convince me that they really were as close as they claimed to be. For one thing, Allie seems to be the outsider in the group from page one. And it’s not just me who thinks that, Allie does too. She feels inadequate compared to gorgeous, agile, practically perfect Juliet, and she feels neglected by Rob, who never seems to notice her the way he notices Juliet. (She is, of course, attracted to Rob, because this is YA and we NEED to have a love triangle.)
When the story begins, there are already these growing rifts between the three that anyone could spot a mile away. For one thing, Juliet is a straight up d-bag in every sense of the word. At least, this is how she came off to me. She’s manipulative, quite a bit condescending, and constantly tries to convince Allie that her thoughts and ideas are ridiculous. What kind of a “best friend” is that? And don’t get me started on Rob, who is barely a character at all because he only exists in conjunction with either Allie or Juliet and has no real personality of his own. The girls believe in him, and therefore he is a real boy. That’s about all there is to him.
What really ruins things though is that all of the really good moments, the suspenseful bits, the chilling revelations, get lost in the shuffle and become ineffective as a result. The tension and the element of fear should be carried through with faster pacing, otherwise it doesn’t feel urgent or even mildly dangerous. Like I said, the narrative is choppy and jumps around from spans of days to entire months going by, sometimes with nothing crazier happening than Allie taking AP Lit over the summer and reading tons of books. I mean, a story about a murder and a sociopath serial killer should make you so anxious that you can’t put the book down. You’re that worried about what might happen next, when the killer will strike or try to silence Allie forever. He does some crazy things, some really disturbing stuff comes to light, but it’s all so few and far between. You forget about it between one incident and the next. It’s not until closer to the end that the loose narrative starts to wind you up, when things start hitting Allie hard and fast. It’s a short book as it is, but most of it felt wasted to me. There are like three pages where she rehashes things she learned from a criminal justice textbook, just an info dump of massive proportions. It’s stuff like this that dulls the book’s otherwise sharper edges.
I was also bothered by the fact that I turned the final page only to discover that this is, in fact, going to be a series. I was thinking it would end in one installment, but nope. Do I think it could’ve been one book? Yes.
RATING: 2.5/5
Take out all the extraneous crap and focus on the action, imminent danger, and very real, believable fear and you would have one hell of a good standalone book, I think. But this fell short for me in a big way. I’m pretty sad about it because I expected more.
