Burning Midnight
Will McIntosh
David Sully is a usual teenage boy. In his modern world, the economy rides on spheres. Spheres can make you smarter, or taller, or have nice teeth, or give you supersonic hearing. He’s been successful before, but having been burnt once by the resident sphere millionaire buyer, he’s reluctant to trust anyone. When Hunter comes along, the whole spectrum of spheres is going to shift…
This innovative magic system – I could have had more! The basis was spheres – burn a Ruby Red one, have straight teeth, or Aqua ones so that you can sleep whenever you need. The price point is all you need to worry about to do. In the manner of Brandon Sanderson, I wished there had been an index at the end of the novel to remind me what each of the spheres burned did to each person. Then I could have flipped back and forth as I wanted.
They have to be super sneaky and smart to survive, but sometimes they are just plain stupid! Hunter was the highlight for me, because she was so pigheaded all the time, and seems to still get there in the end. Unlike Sully, who once burnt, becomes a suspicious bastard. The Spheres had been around for around 5 years, and hunting them is what makes a living for Sully and Hunter. Sully has created a second wave, and the new ones are something special again. And that makes the whole premise of this novel.
Yes, yes, there’s romance in this novel. It was inevitable. You can’t have teenage fiction without it it seems. Hunter did the usual ‘I’m not girlfriend material speech’, and Sully did his ‘I don’t care, you’re so hot, mighty sphere hunter’. And didn’t everything work out very interestingly, and not so straight forward and good? Yes, yes it did.
Burning midnight drove me absolutely up the wall with really wanting to read it. Worst of all, I had to stop about 10 pages from the end and do some other things in the mean time, and that was just cruel! I’d recommend this novel without reservation to any teenager who enjoys an action packed time.
The ending could have frustrated me, but actually I thought it left me feeling quite satisfied, despite it ending a little abruptly. Some other reviews I have read suggest it needs a sequel, but it’s not at all clear where that would go. For me, it was very satisfying and I think it’s going to give you a couple of really good hours of reading.
