Midnighters: The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld is one of those Young Adult writers that I will return to every now and then, normally after I read something that is far more difficult to digest as was the case with the book I read before this one.

His books are extremely formulaic and predictable to some degree and tend to focus on PG-13 demons or vampires as well as very young protagonists. You can always count on there being a teenage love story in there as well and yeah, The Secret Hour contained all of these things and it didn't surprise me at all.

It would have surprised me if it wasn't like this.

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This book is about a lot of people and I would imagine that the focus will change from one person to the next as the trilogy goes on but in this book we are focused on Jessica, a 15-year old (or around there) who recently moved to Bixby, Oklahoma and did normal teenager stuff until one night she is awake late at night and realizes that everyone else in her family is frozen in time. She wanders outside and is pursued by some dark and evil-seeming creatures and she barely escapes back to her home.

Later on and purely by unbelievable coincidence she meets other people who also can experience this period of time-stop that is only available to a select few who are named "The Midnighters." They are all teens of course because we would lose the Harry Potter/Twilight aspect of the plot of we were to throw adults into the mix.

Her and her friends go and do stuff to try to attack the enemy horde that they call "The Darklings" and their weapons that they can use against them have been discovered via the abilities that various members of the Midnighters have discovered over time. The weapons are practical such as pure steel, light, electricity, and technology in general. The problems that happen as far as using a lot of this is concerned is that machines and other such tech that involves combustion or electronics that move, will not function during the time-stop hour between midnight and 1am. So they have to be creative.

Not a great deal is given to us as far as the overall story arc is concerned in this volume and this was confusing to me when I was reading it because I was unaware that it was a trilogy. Since Westerfeld struck gold in the "Pretties Trilogy" this thing of his of making almost everything a trilogy should just be expected at this point.

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The book isn't "bad" per se, but it is just so similar to everything else that Westerfeld has written that if you were to give me just a chapter of it and tell me to read that, my first question afterwards would be "did the guy who wrote "Pretties" write this book?"" and I would be correct. You can tell that Scott simply tweaks character names and locations and basically writes the same books over and over again. Is that lazy? Well he is the multi-millionaire author and I am not so whatever it is that he is doing, you could go ahead and say that he is an expert of it.

To me, his books all seem to be written not for the literary audience but for Hollywood to hopefully take notice of and purchase the rights for so that they can dump $20 million into a teen-love-drama that is basically guaranteed to make money in cinemas and streaming.

While I was reading it I could see from miles away who Jessica's love interest was going to be and the way in which they innocently fawn over one another in such a predictable way was so akin to "Pretties" love story that you could basically just swap them out between either story and I don't think anyone would notice.

I ended up scanning a lot of the chapters of this book because almost all of it seems to be long for the sake of making this into 3 books instead of just 1. It is in fact, fast-paced, like the professional reviews suggest and it is also quite short. This is the modern-day version of a money grab and Westerfeld has been extremely successful at doing just that.

I don't dislike Westerfeld. He has his purpose in my life. But if you have never read anything by him this is not the place to start. Seeing as how all of his books are essentially the same I believe the cream that rises to the top is the "Pretties" books and if you are going to read anything by him, that should be where you go. Not this trilogy which I found rather boring in comparison.

Here is the GoodReads link if you are into that sort of thing.