What We Saw at Night by Jacquelyn Mitchard (review)

Afflicted with xeroderma pigmentosum, essentially a fatal allergy to sunlight, sixteen-year- old Allie and her fellow sufferers, Rob and Juliet, rule the night in the small Minnesotan town where their clinic is located and where they struggle to come to terms with an illness that will likely kill them before middle age. At daredevil Juliet’s behest, the trio has recently taken up the extreme sport of nocturnal parkour, scaling cliffs and leaping buildings in the middle of the night. Allie is having the time of her short life until she witnesses what appears to be a murder and is drawn into a web of lies so thick that she’s unable to tell hero from villain, especially when it comes to the two people she thought she knew better than anyone, Juliet and Rob. Allie’s illness serves primarily to locate her as witness to nefarious goings-on she’d otherwise never see, but it also acts to insulate her and her friends from the sunlit world, making her hesitancy to confide what she saw to a “daytimer” entirely believable. As the book goes on, however, Allie’s voice grows less authentic, and by the time she is conveniently inspired to pursue criminology studies, she ends up sounding more like a forensic scientist than a teen whose life is threatened by both an illness and a serial murderer. Still, a small town and the machinations of its less than pleasant residents are always intriguing, and an ending featuring a dead (maybe?) friend and a killer on the loose promises more suspense in future installments.