In Nightfall is a novel by Suzanne Young.
Finished on: 9.4.2025

Plot:
Theo and her brother Marco have to spend the summer in Nightfall, aka the middle of nowhere, Oregon, with their grandmother. That’s what you get for throwing a party without your parents‘ permission. Their grandmother is strange and doesn’t seem to actually want them there. She also expects them to be home by dark every day. But when Theo and Marco meet Minnow and her friends, things seem to be perking up. They are enigmatic, beautiful, intriguing. But maybe they are actually also the reason why they should be home by dark after all.

In Nightfall is a lot of fun to read but it is not a book that will stay with me for a very long time, I think.

As a vampire fan who grew up with Buffy, In Nightfall – that bills itself as a mix of Buffy and The Lost Boys – immediately drew my eye and I was really looking forward to read it. And while I enjoyed many aspects of it, especially its focus on the female characters and the amount of love and understanding they get, even when they do absolutely shitty things, it didn’t completely manage to win me over.

Part of it was that the solution was too neat and too sudden, stretching my suspence of disbelief to the breaking point and also rendering the sense of danger that came before it a little absurd. It seemed like a cowardly choice to have the story end this happily without the characters really having to pay a (more permanent) price.

The other part that the book was a little light overall. I was missing some emotional depths to really connect with, or maybe more of a sense of a message. There were roots in the story of both, but they never developed the impact that they should have or that I hoped for. It made the book more of a snack than a meal: enjoyable for sure, but not really filling.

Summarizing: fun entertainment but a little forgettable.