The Forbidden Game Trilogy: The Chase

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t yet read book one (The Hunter), grab your copy and get reading…

What’s going on?

We left Jenny and her friends, at the end of book one, missing a paper house, a friend and a certain promise ring. After confining Julian with a rune of constraint behind a door in his own game, they escape back into the real world, only to have the paper house stolen. The two guys who were following Jenny at the start of the book are under the Game’s spell, and they break into her house and make off with it.

The search for Summer, who died during the Game, begins. Jenny and her friends go back to school, and seem to be falling prey to strange hallucinations.

Eventually, they find the paper house – exploded as if something has burst out of it. The guys who stole the house have played their own Game, and they lost… after freeing Julian from his prison. Now he’s trying to hold Jenny to her oath: “All I refuse and thee I choose.”

Jenny agrees to play a new game: Lambs and Monsters. What she doesn’t realise until afterward is that everyone who survived the paper house is a player: Jenny, Tom, Dee, Michael, Audrey and Zach, against Julian the Shadow Man and his supernatural assistants, the Creeper and the Lurker.

Jenny and her friends have to find Julian’s ‘base’ before all the ‘lambs’ are captured, or Jenny will belong to him forever.

Why does it rock?

The thing I love about these books is that the characters grow and change because of what they’ve experienced. Tom is insecure about his future with Jenny, after seeing her reaction to Julian. Zach, a keen photographer, gets artist’s block on his return from the Game. Jenny herself is stronger and more confident, and attracts the unwanted, admiring attention of the school’s quarterback as a result.

The second game is set in the real world, and is possibly creepier than the first one because of it. Being hunted at school, at home or out on the street is far more chilling than being hunted in a fantasy world.

Julian plays by the rules, giving them obscure clues before abducting each ‘lamb’, but the advantage is on his side. The ways in which each of Jenny’s friends are captured are suited to each of them, which makes each loss more distressing to Jenny and to the reader.

This is just as fast-paced and intriguing a read as the first book, if not better. The Creeper and the Lurker were barely featured in The Hunter, but LJ Smith more than makes up for that here. And Julian is still seductively, ethereally cruel. Fans of sexy supernatural beings won’t be disappointed, and fans of traditional terror will be more than happy, too!

The Chase (The Forbidden Game Vol. 2) – L. J. Smith

Paperback, 768 pages (Trilogy)

June 8, 2010, by Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing

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This trilogy was first published in 1994, as part of the hugely successful Point Horror series of young adult horror fiction. I read it just after it came out – I was ten or eleven years old at the time. Perhaps for that reason, this is one of my favourite YA books.

Whether or not nostalgia gives me rose-tinted glasses, I have no idea. What I do know is that this first book still manages to be far more original and exciting than most of the recent releases I’ve read, and it’s now seventeen years old!

The Plot

Jenny Thornton stumbles across a games store on the seedy side of town, while looking for something to keep guests occupied at her boyfriend’s birthday party. She buys a mysterious game in a plain white box from an enigmatic stranger, feeling drawn to it in a way she can’t explain.

When she and her friends gather to play the game, it turns out to be a paper house. Once it’s constructed, each player colours in a paper doll to represent his- or herself, and draws their worst nightmare on a piece of paper, placing them in different rooms of the house. When they begin to play the game, however, they’re sucked into a nightmarish house that’s definitely not made of paper…

Jenny and her friends must face their worst nightmares in order to get to the exit at the top of the house. Its occupant, the boy from the games store who sold Jenny the game, is actually a Shadow Man, and he wants Jenny. If they don’t reach the top of the house by dawn, they’ll all have to stay with Julian forever. And if you die in the game, you die for real.

The Characters

While Jenny is your classic innocent heroine, with a boyfriend she plans to marry one day and a complete lack of understanding of the effect she has on men, her friends are a lot more vivid and interesting.

Audrey has moved all around the world with her diplomat father, and she has grown up in many cultures and learned many languages. As a result, she appears cosmopolitan and sophisticated, fashion-conscious and sexy. As her fear consumes her, we see behind the mask.

Dee is an African-American athlete, skilled in kung fu and a lover of horror movies. She’s Jenny’s closest and oldest friend, and often serves as a grounding force for her.

Michael is laid back, scruffy and the most prone to fear of the guys, and somehow he and Audrey are a couple. The unconventional relationship seems superficial at face value, but as time goes on we see that it’s deeper than it seems.

Summer is the girl everyone wants to care for – petite, blonde and fragile. Jenny is protective of her, and Summer depends on her for her support, inside the Game and out.

Zachary is Jenny’s cousin, a distant type with a strong artistic streak. Jenny often muses that he cares more for his photography than he does for people.

Tom is Jenny’s boyfriend – the tall, dark and handsome jock. Jenny adores him, but as she progresses through the Game, Julian the Shadow Man is a constant barrier between she and Tom.

As for Julian, the white-haired, blue-eyed Shadow Man… well, that would be telling! You’ll have to read to find out exactly how he and Jenny clash… and if you’re anything like me, you won’t be rooting for Jenny to go back to boring Tom by the end of the book!

L.J. Smith The Forbidden Game Trilogy Vol. 1 ”The Hunter”

Paperback, 240 pages

March1 , 1994 by Simon Pulse

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Amy Says

Just in case you’re coming to this review without having read the previous two books in the Midnighters series, this is going to be pretty heavy on the spoilers for The Secret Hour and Touching Darkness. You have been warned!

This is the fast-paced finale to the Midnighters trilogy, and it lives up to the first two books. The whole story arc takes place within a few months, but by book three, there’s a marked difference in every one of the characters compared to book one. By Blue Noon, the stakes are a lot higher than they were in The Secret Hour.

So what’s the premise of this final chapter? Toward the start, the ‘blue time’ that marks the twenty-fifth hour descends… during first period at the high school. The whole school is frozen, and only Jessica, Jonathan, Dess, Melissa and Rex are able to move.

Needless to say, this is a little unprecedented. The blue time doesn’t last a full hour, but during that brief period, the usual midnighter laws of physics apply – everything else stops moving, the darklings wake up, and Jonathan is no longer subject to normal gravity.

Once the world goes back to normal, the midnighters realise that a regular human was sucked into the blue time… and their problems are only just beginning.

Blue Noon turns the established laws of Westerfeld’s universe upside down. We as readers have no idea what’s going on, because neither do the midnighters. It’s also hard to predict the way some of them will behave.

Jonathan almost seems to welcome the changes – he relishes his ability to fly, and any extra flying time is worth the extra darkling risk. This puts a strain on his relationship with Jessica, who has her own problems to deal with – her little sister, Beth, is close to finding out the truth about the twenty-fifth hour.

Melissa is working on her mindcasting skills with Madeleine, the midnighter who’s been hiding in Bixby for her entire life, discovered by Dess during Touching Darkness. She’s arguably the most sane and stable midnighter now, a sharp reversal of her role in The Secret Hour.

Rex, on the other hand, is having trouble with his darkling side. Now that he has an aversion to the number thirteen, modern technology and alloys, life as a midnighter is a little difficult. He also has trouble keeping his dark, predatory instincts in check – but in certain ways, he’s still Rex.

As for Dess, her polymath powers really kick into gear in this instalment, and it’s down to her calculations that the midnighters come up with a plan to save the innocent citizens of Bixby. Jessica’s power as the light-bringer is also instrumental… with devastating consequences.

I found myself skipping paragraphs during the final race against time – not because I was bored, because I was impatient to see what was going to happen. Maybe that makes me a book-nerd, but mostly I just think it makes Westerfeld an amazing writer. Once I knew that the world wasn’t going to end, then I went back and read the parts I’d skipped again… and they were great.

I can’t recommend this series strongly enough. YA fiction is alive and well, thanks to some much-needed Westerfeld CPR. I have no idea what his other YA books are like, but I’m going to give them a shot!

Blue Noon – Scott Westerfeld

28 February, 2006 by HarperTeen

Paperback, 384 pages

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A lot of the time, the second book in a trilogy has a tendency to stagnate. That’s not the case here – the second book in the Midnighters series speeds along nicely, throwing the spotlight on Melissa, Rex and Dess rather than Jessica and Jonathan.

Of all the midnighter talents, Melissa’s mindcasting is the most intriguing. Throughout the first book, The Secret Hour, Melissa needs to wear headphones during the school day to avoid being driven completely insane by the babble of minds she’s unable to shut out. The second book sees her begin to work on this, and her relationship with Rex develops as a result.

Dess, meanwhile, has found her father’s GPS coordinate-recording device, and using her polymath skills she discovers another midnighter – one older, wiser and more fearful than the five main characters.

Jessica’s main issue in the second book is one common to a lot of YA readers – her little sister, Beth, is becoming more and more suspicious of Jessica’s after-dark antics. This goes on to become a major problem in the last book of the trilogy, but for now it’s just an amusing look at the irritation caused by younger siblings.

Jessica’s sister isn’t the only family member we meet – it’s revealed that Rex’s father is very mentally handicapped as a result of an ‘accident’. We don’t learn for quite a while what that accident was, but it turns out to be another intriguing facet to the midnighters’ world.

The main plot of Touching Darkness revolves around Rex. After Jonathan and Jessica notice a man frozen at midnight, in the middle of taking photographs of her bedroom window, Rex utilises Melissa’s mindcasting powers to track him down. They discover that the darklings are communicating with certain humans by use of the runes used in midnighter lore – the runes that Rex, as a seer, knows how to read.

The story takes a very dark turn, and one that I inadvertently spoiled myself for, while double-checking something for my review of the first book on Wikipedia (damn you, all-knowing Internet!). Even so, when I got to that part of the book, it prompted me to say aloud, “Dude, that’s awesome!” Yes. I was talking to a book. And yes, I’m English, and therefore should never say the word ‘dude’. And potentially not ‘awesome’, either. Anyway… I won’t ruin the surprise, but it’s not something your average midnighter would be happy witnessing or experiencing…

The involvement of normal humans in the secrets of the twenty-fifth hour didn’t seem at first to be too threatening. When that hour falls, every non-midnighter human is frozen solid and unaware of what’s going on, after all. However, when you take into account that the darklings are using the humans to reach the midnighters in ‘normal’ time, things get a little more serious. And when Rex is kidnapped, things get very serious indeed.

I mentioned in my review of the first book that I was a bit underwhelmed by Jessica’s unique midnighter talent. It seems to make a bit more sense in Touching Darkness, and comes in useful when it comes to rescuing Rex, but it still feels a little lacking. Having already finished the third book, I can tell you to keep suspending that disbelief, though. The payoff is worth it.

Touching Darkness – Scott Westerfeld

1 March, 2005, by Harper Teen

Paperback, 336 Pages

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5) Malinda Lo – Ash

A fresh, interesting take on the classic Cinderella fairytale.

4) Melissa Marr – Wicked Lovely

A deftly-spun tale of one girl’s struggle against the allure of the faerie kingdom.

3) Michelle Zink – Prophecy of the Sisters

A unique, compelling story of the battle of wills between two sisters, set in the late 19th century.

2) Scott Westerfeld – The Midnighters Trilogy

Fantastic, dark series about the twenty-fifth hour, which is only perceptible to those born at midnight.

1) Kelley Armstrong – The Darkest Powers Trilogy

Set in the author’s established Otherworld universe, this teen trilogy stands alone, and stands out for me as the best YA of 2010.

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The Secret Hour – Scott Westerfeld

I read this book in one day. Nope, it’s no shorter than most YA novels. Yep, it really is that good.

The first lesson I re-learned from The Secret Hour is ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. Or rather, ‘don’t judge a book by its back cover’. If you’re looking at a UK copy, published by Atom/Little Brown, it reads:

As the new girl at Bixby High School, Jessica Day expected some unwelcome attention. What she didn’t expect was to feel an instant connection to a stranger in the corridor…

Who is this boy dressed in black? And why can she feel his eyes following her wherever she goes?

There is a romance subplot in Scott Westerfeld’s novel but it doesn’t kick in until a third of the way through the book. But I digress…

So, what’s the novel really about? Well, it’s not exactly boy-centric. The protagonist, Jessica, relocates to a new town to find that at the stroke of midnight, time freezes and the twenty-fifth hour begins.

Only people born at the midnight instant are able to perceive the secret hour, and only in Bixby. Jessica is befriended by four other midnighters, who help her to understand what she is experiencing.

Rex is a ‘seer’, able to perceive other midnighters by sight and read the ancient midnighter lore. Melissa is a ‘mindcaster’, or psychic, and is often overwhelmed by the amount she can sense from other people’s minds. Dess is a ‘polymath’ who’s able to use mathematics and numbers against enemies in the secret hour, and Jonathan is an ‘acrobat’, and is not subject to the same rules of gravity as the rest.

In this first book, the predators which inhabit the twenty-fifth hour, the darklings and slithers, are hell-bent on destroying Jessica. The mystery is, why? They pursue her with single-minded intent, and there are many more of them than the other midnighters are accustomed to.

Jessica spends her midnight hours avoiding the creatures who want her dead, and with the others’ help, she attempts to figure out what her own unique power is.

The characters are in their junior year of high school, and the third-person narrative flicks between them, keeping Jessica as the main focus. There are scenes set at the school, but most of the story takes place after dark, in the time before, during and after the secret hour.

And it’s fantastic! There are elements of conflict between group members, who all have their own quirks. The slithers and darklings are a strange combination of malevolent, fearful and animalistic. The romance between Jessica and Jonathan unfolds at a steady pace, yet is devoid of cliché.

I felt a little let down by the eventual revelation of Jessica’s midnighter talent, but this is the first book in the trilogy, and there’s plenty of time left for the implications of it to be fully explained. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for a while; since I plan to dive straight into the second novel, Touching Darkness, I have a feeling I won’t be sceptical for long.

Publisher: HarperTeen (March 1, 2005)

ISBN-10: 0060519533
ISBN-13: 978-0060519537

* * * Coming Soon: Amy reviews book 2 and 3 in the Midnighter series and Bec interviews Scott Westerfeld.

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On the surface, Malinda Lo’s debut novel seems like a classic Cinderella tale, and in a way, it is. However, it doesn’t turn out the way you’d expect, and if you’ve read my other reviews, you’ll know that that makes me wildly happy!

Ash is both the name of the novel and of the title character, whose name is Aisling, and Ash for short. This is an obvious play on the Cinderella/Cinders character from the fairytale, and the way Ash progresses from the start is the story we all know from our childhoods.

When Ash’s father remarries and then dies, leaving debts behind, her stepmother demands that Ash becomes the family servant to repay them. Ash longs to run away to join the fairies in the nearby woods – fairies that most people have come to deny the existence of in these modern times.

One in particular bars her passage to Taninli, the fairy realm. His name is Sidhean, and he insists that she isn’t ready… yet. Replacing the fairy godmother you’d expect from a Cinderella story, he grants her favours that come at a price – that one day, she will be his.

Unfortunately, before he spirits her away to Taninli, Ash falls for the King’s Huntress, Kaisa. On her website (http://www.malindalo.com/), Malinda Lo explains, “In the first draft of Ash, the Cinderella character falls for the prince. It wasn’t until my good friend Lesly read it and said, ‘You know, the prince guy is kinda boring,’ that I realized that Cinderella was gay.”

Nice subversion, don’tcha think?

The story is told from an emotional distance a lot of the time – the same way the fairytales I read as a child were. More emphasis is put into the events than how the character feels about them, although Ash is far from devoid of emotion. It’s an interesting approach to take, and one that diminishes the LGBT element of the story a little.

Nothing about Ash is voyeuristic – it’s told on a much more innocent level than most young adult novels, and I’d say it’s aimed toward readers in their early teens rather than their later years. Reference is made toward romantic feelings, but sexual desire is barely mentioned.

The only complaint I’d have about the book is that it only skims the surface of something that could have been a lot deeper. There are references to village greenwitches, and mentions that Ash’s mother knew something about the subject and would have wanted Ash to study it, too. The fairy godmother substitute, Sidhean, is barely in the book, despite his claim to Ash’s future, and he had the potential to be more menacing and possessive, which would have made Ash’s plight that much more interesting.

For the most part, though, I enjoyed the story. It’s definitely worth a read, for its originality and for the authentic fairytale feel. The prequel, Huntress, should also be worth checking out when it’s published in April 2011. Watch this space!

Ash – Malinda Lo

$16.99 – Paperback

Hodder Headline

ISBN:9780340988374

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I’ll start with the bottom line: I really enjoyed this book! It’s completely different from the other teen novels I’ve read recently, which is due mainly to the fact that it’s set in the 1890s.

Michelle Zink crafts a Gothic, immersive atmosphere for her story, complete with realistic social values for the time period, without sacrificing the essence of what normally concerns teenage girls – boyfriends, the opinions of peers, family and friends. Despite the fact that the fate of the world is at stake, there’s a refreshing lack of melodrama.

And product placement. And music artist name-dropping.

In fact, I didn’t just enjoy this book. I loved it!

The protagonist, Lia, is the joint head of the family estate following her father’s death, along with her twin, Alice. Of the two, Lia is the more responsible – except when it comes to James, her boyfriend and the library custodian’s son. Then, Lia’s like any other teenage girl with her first love – taking advantage of any precious stolen moment alone. Only, it’s the 19th century, and so nothing even close to X-rated happens.

As another change from the usual teen dark fantasy format, Lia’s story doesn’t revolve around her relationship with James. In fact, romance takes a distant backseat for most of the time – insert reviewer cheer here!

Family and friendship are very much the central themes in the story. Lia learns that since she and her twin were born, they’ve been destined to play a role in the plan of Samael – a demon who needs to pass through the Gate into the mortal realm. Assuming he does, the apocalypse will then ensue. The catch is, one of the twins is the Guardian of the Gate, and is charged with preventing Samael from being summoned. The other twin is the Gate itself, with the power to call forth Samael.

The twins are turned against each other, and Lia relies on new friends Sonia and Luisa, who bear the same strange wrist markings as Lia, to help her unravel the truth.

If I have any criticism to direct at this book at all, it’s only minor. One thing that surprised me is that Lia seemed to have a very distant relationship with her twin from the outset, and I didn’t really get a sense of much of a bond between them. A closer tie between Lia and Alice could have been unravelled in a very interesting way, and I think it’s a shame that it wasn’t explored more deeply.

Having said that, the distance does make sense if you factor in the things we learn about Alice toward the end of the book… so I can’t complain too much.

The only other thing I’d criticise is that I saw one of the major twists coming about a hundred pages in advance. I’m around ten years older than the intended audience, though, and they were a great hundred pages, so don’t let that put you off! Even if you do see it coming, it won’t be a waste of your time.

There are twists and turns aplenty in this book, and there wasn’t a single moment that jarred me out of the 19^th century world and back into the 21^st century. It’s a well-written, compelling story that ends with Lia setting out for England to continue her struggle against evil in the second book, Guardian of the Gate, and I’ll definitely be reading along.

Michell Zink Publisher Website
Michelle Zink Official Website

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I have to admit, I approached Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely with more than a little trepidation. While I was growing up, the Point Horror series was at the peak of its popularity, and the emphasis there was definitely on the supernatural side of things, rather than the sexual chemistry between the two main characters.

Since reading a certain series of books within the past two or three years, I’d begun to think that plot in YA novels now comes second to how totally hot the main male character is, and how much the female protagonist wants him. Wicked Lovely, the first in Melissa Marr’s bestselling series of the same name, was a refreshing change.

The novel revolves around faeries, and one teenage girl’s ability to see them, despite the fact that most humans can’t. The trait is hereditary, and her grandmother has passed down rules to keep the girl, Aislinn, safe: never let on that you can see faeries, never speak to them, and above all, never attract their attention.

The story begins when, despite following the first two rules, Aislinn inadvertently breaks the third: the Summer King of the faeries, weakened by his lack of a Summer Queen, decides that Aislinn must be his. The novel details Aislinn’s struggle against this fate, and her desire to hold onto her life, family, plans for the future, and her human boyfriend. Refusing, however, will have dire consequences for the faeries and the world in general…

This novel’s strongest point is definitely its protagonist. Aislinn is a very positive role model for teenage girls; instead of giving herself over to the inevitable and allowing herself to be seduced by the Summer King, Keenan, she rejects the plans he has for her and makes her own decisions. She has a sensible head on her shoulders when it comes to drugs, alcohol and sex, and there’s definitely a lot to relate to in her character.

The concept of faeries running around the world, completely invisible to humans and wreaking havoc amongst their own kind, really did appeal to me. There has been such a huge focus on vampires and werewolves in teen fiction lately that it was good to read something a little different, where the supernatural race is mostly mischievous rather than intense.

The one thing I did feel let this book down was that the plight of the faeries didn’t feel all that severe. The Summer King seemed more confused and petulant at Aislinn’s resistance than dismayed and desperate. It was never properly specified what would happen if Aislinn refused, and the Winter Queen, the book’s antagonist, didn’t seem to have a focused goal except to stop Aislinn becoming the Summer Queen. A little more depth and detail would have helped, here.

Overall, though, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. There were some fantastic little moments between Aislinn and Seth, her friend-turned-boyfriend, and the faery lore was well-researched and explained. I’ll be picking up the next book, Ink Exchange, the next time I’m wandering around the local book shop!

Wicked Lovely – Melissa Marr

11 September 2008 by Harper Collins

Paperback, 336 pages

ISBN: 9780007263073 (ISBN-10) 0007263074

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