Touching Darknessreveals many secrets tangled among the five midnighters of Bixby, Oklahoma. Melissa and Rex have a strange new relationship, Dess learns an astonishing secret that she tries to keep to herself, and Jessica is blown away as she begins to see the kinds of secrets her friends are keeping. And all this on top of a horrifying new threat to the midnighters very survival.
The second book in Westerfeld's Midnighters series is just as compelling and filled with adventure as the first (reviewed here). The story is full of secrets and misunderstandings, not to mention a horrible midnighter past that is revealed. I love this new-to-me series where I don't have to wait years for a sequel (yet). I'm not sure if the revealed secrets really cleared up anything or just produced more mysteries. This is an intriguing and pretty original series. The only part I found frustrating was the seeming lack of technology - a lot of problems would have been solved with cell phones. I wasn't sure if the characters were just really behind the times or if the book was set in an earlier decade.
Read-alikes:
A little like the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan with a darker feel (and no Greek gods)
And also The Girl Who Could Fly by Victoria Foster
RATINGS:
s-factor: !@
They swore regularly, but not overwhelmingly
mrg-factor: none
v-factor: ->->->
Some fighting and injuries
Overall rating: ****