Fantasy

Fifteen-year-old Jessica Day moves to Oklahoma and discovers a secret 25th hour, which most of Earth experiences as a millisecond glitch. But Jessica can move through the secret hour -- along with four other teenagers and a host of deadly supernatural creatures hiding from the daylight hours.

The best part of The Secret Hour is its dead-on sense of place. It nails the desolate, stifling Bixby, Oklahoma -- which is more than just a landscape, it's the very terrain of adolescence. Its teenage protagonists interact in believable patterns: they're less a super-sentai team and more resentful and uncertain of one another. But I'm a little dubious of the book's central assertion that human-made systems (numerology, metallurgy, cartography, etc.) can be used as weapons against the inhuman, unsophisticated enemies. (I suppose that my suspension of disbelief started slipping after longitude and latitude were introduced as supernatural factors -- what, demons arrange themselves in strict relation to Greenwich? And only since 1884?) I can understand it as an extension of a standard fantasy conceit (see: fairies and cold iron) but it would probably be more interesting if the midnight nasties turned out to be human-created bugaboos in the bargain (and thus existing in the same sphere as human-created systems for comprehending the universe). But I somehow doubt the Midnighters series (of which The Secret Hour is volume one) will go this route: it seems beyond the scope of its cheerfully YA ambitions. ( )

292

The Secret Hour was a great fast-paced read.
I really loved the concept of the midnight hour which is the 25th hour of the night that only people born at midnight can experience. My favorite chapter was the one where Jessica first woke when time had frozen. I wish I had gotten to know some of the characters better. They all have special powers one of them can even jump fly. Jessica's power is not revealed until the end of the book. Her power which I will not reveal because of spoilers will be a great tool to have during the midnight hour in the future books in this series ( )

While the book was enjoyable and had an interesting premise, it lacked certain things in the plot to keep the intrigue, as for the characters, well, they weren't the greatest, I found myself disconnected and felt that they could have been written better, and seriously, Jessica Day? Since she's a new midnighter, she has have her last name as day doesn't she?
I was left disappointed by the end of this book, this is a case where the premise was better then the actual story itself. ( )