Take a chance on David Whitley’s fantasy conspiracy thriller
What can you buy for 7.99? You could get seven items off a fast food dollar menu, buy a ticket to a two hour movie, or buy about two gallons of gas. Ooooryou could take a chance on an exciting new book. The novel in question is David Whitley’s The Midnight Charter, the first book in the Agora Trilogy. You can actually get it for even less than 7.99 if you order from Amazon.com.Young adult fantasy literature has had a bright light shined on it recently thanks to the success of films like The Spiderwick Chronicles and especially the blockbuster Twilight franchise. Die-hard fans have been excited to see their favorite series make it to the big screen, while some other critics have wondered what the big fuss is actually about. The Midnight Charter is a young adult novel that has enough meat on its bones to satisfy many adult readers as well.The debut novel ofyoung British writer David Whitley (published when he was 24) is a blend of genres. The book is set in a fantasy city called Agora (“marketplace”) where everything from ideas to people can be bought and sold. Children are the property of their parents until they reach the age of twelve, and the story focuses on two children, Mark and Lily, whose lives intersect as a result of that rule. The “Midnight Charter” of the title refers to a mysterious prophetic document that predicts the coming of two figures known as the Protagonist and the Antagonist. Whether these figures have anything to do with Mark and Lily is one of the central mysteries of the series, and it’s far from resolved by the end of this first book.However, another mystery concerns the Director of Receipts, the central ruler of Agora’s twelve districts. Mark and Lily stumble upon a dark secret related to the Director, leading directly into the next book of the series, The Children of the Lost. The trilogy will conclude with 2011′s The Canticle of Whispers, after which Whitley intends to publish a new, as-yet-unnamed, novel. However, he has dropped one hint as to the plot of the book, stating in an interview with ThirstForFiction that it’s set in “a different world entirely: a modern, war-torn place, but with a secret more bizarre than anything I’ve done before.” Sounds like you’d better start saving those dollars now.