Customer Reviews

Abarat Book 3: Books of Abarat #3 Absolute Midnight

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been following the Books of Abarat since the first release. I was eleven or twelve. If any of you have been in love with this series since the beginning, you know that we had to wait seven years between the release of "Days of Magic, Nights of War" and "Absolute Midnight."

I actually bought "Absolute Midnight" the day it came out, but could not bring myself to start reading until yesterday. Seven years' anticipation was brought to fruition in about sixteen hours of reading. I was not disappointed.

"Absolute Midnight" is fantastic.

Unlike the second book, I don't think you can delve straight into "Absolute Midnight" without reading the other books. It is a fully contained story, but it is firmly planted in the Abarat. There are no explanations of phenomena or mysteries addressed in the first two and very little backstory. So please, please, please read at least the second book before picking up this one.

The story basically picks up exactly where "Days of Magic, Nights of War" left off. The islands are on the verge of the greatest war the archipelago has ever seen. The consequences are dire: if the forces of darkness win, midnight will eclipse the Abarat forever. Candy and her friends (although "friends" seems too light a word for the relationship she has with Malingo and Co.)aren't just up against Mater Motley. Monsters hidden in the caves of the islands and depths of the ocean are eagerly awaiting the darkness, and monsters beyond time and dimension as the Abarat knows it are waiting to destroy the islands.

"Absolute Midnight", while keeping the lyrical wonder that characterizes the series, is almost shockingly dark. Destroyers beyond comprehension, the insane but almost paradoxically calculating Mater Motley, stitchling armies displaying ominous levels of intelligence not seen before, corrupt councils, and more--Candy's allies have either turned their backs, or been silenced. Even Princess Boa, supposedly the embodiment of all things good and pure, is more selfish and cruel than Christopher Carrion ever was.

Character depth was pretty astounding. The Carrion family in particular got a great treatment, continuing and deepening the development brought up in book two. I've rarely felt so badly for a character as I did for Carrion.

Most of the people in the book were treated similarly. Malingo has believably developed courage and confidence, as another example, and Candy has grown into herself admirably in the rather welcome absence of Boa.
There were a few instances involving other characters where I felt something was done outof character, or something was unrealistic in relation to a character's past behavior. There was also one deus ex machina moment that sat a little oddly, but in the end I was so grateful things turned out that way that I didn't think too much about it. One thing that did kind of strike me as not entirely believable was the speed and intensity of Candy and Gazza's relationship. I thought it was great, don't get me wrong, but I wish it had been developed with the same depth as the other relationships and characters.

My only complaint was that I was seriously hoping to get more about Letheo. As weak and flawed as he is, he is a fascinating character with potential to be either great, or terrible.

The book itself is gorgeous. Nearly 600 pages, this edition is large, glossy, and full of incredible artwork.

Overall, the story was definitely worth waiting for. I was terrified I'd be disappointed, but I wasn't. I was enthralled. Abarat keeps getting better and better. It hold YA fiction--or any fiction, for that matter-- to a magnificent standard that's been mostly lost. If you read it, you will not regret it.

Given the cliffhanger, though, let's all hope we don't have another seven years to wait =)

After how breathless book 2 left me, I've been looking forward to this book quite excitedly. Imagine my disappointment when I received my kindle preorder and discovered there was no artwork. Not a single picture apart from the cover. Considering how important the pictures are to the story (and the fact they are included in the first two kindle editions!), this was a ridiculous oversight and maybe just greedy cost-cutting. I guess I'll have to rebuy the book in hardcover.

The story itself, however, is fantastic. Really quite amazing. I can't wait for the fourth book, Barker, it seems, is gearing up to write his best work and I think he knows it too..

Let me preface this by saying that I loved the first two books of Abarat. I read them 5 or 6 times and loved them each time I reread them. I have never seen an author create such a beautiful world. The sense of adventure was incredible and I enjoyed every second of it. On that note, let's start discussing Abarat 3. I enjoyed Abarat 3, but some things were seriously disappointing and prevented this book from getting more stars in my opinion. First things first, there was little character development. Candy was unfortunately a pretty dull character in this novel, which was disappointing. She was a very good character in the first two novels, given perfect traits to allow the reader to identify with her. However, in this novel, she became a character whose purpose was to allow the events in the book to happen. She hardly developed at all. She does receive a new love interest in the novel and I did not mind her love interest as much as some other people did. Barker has commonly done that love at first sight thing in many of his novels.

This whole character development thing was disappointing because Candy should not be a dull character, in the first two novels, she is a rebel and she is filled with just enough angst to make her a superb individual. Honestly in this book, for me, I began to actually get disappointed whenever I would get to a chapter from Candy's POV, though that was mostly because the side characters often had the best chapters. Where Candy received bad character development, characters such as Mater Motley and Rojo Pixler received great and very interesting chapters. These were often the best chapters in the book. Furthermore, a familiar character from the first two novels also develops well.

The action scenes were tremendous, though sometimes confusing. The book read like a movie for the most part, it's begging to be put on the silver screen. There are a lot of magic battles going on here and for the most part, they are pretty intense. Things get destroyed, massive things get summoned to battle, it's all a lot of fun really. However, sometimes Barker can get a bit carried away with descriptions of what's going on, hurting the pacing and intensity of the scene. Furthermore, sometimes the descriptions are a bit confusing, there's a lot of adjectives and it's just kind of difficult to wrap your head around what he's trying to say.

Honestly, though I was a bit disappointed with all of the action scenes. In the first two books, when you got an action scene, you received a lot more than just action. 2 examples come to mind: when Houlihan chased Candy and when Carrion chased after Candy. In both of those cases, when the action started, you received not only all the intensity of the action sequence, but Barker also took the time to give you a description of the world he built. When Houlihan chased Candy in Babilonium, he gave a description of the island while she was chased. There was very little of that in this novel, there was just straight action. I really wanted to see more description of the islands. I mean, Barker took the time to create a beautiful world, so I think we should get to see more of it. I didn't get that sense of adventure from this book that I got from the first two. That sense of adventure is the thing which caused me to read the first two novels 5 or 6 times. It was missing in this novel and was replaced with fights and conflicts. And though these conflicts were good in most cases, I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed. I wanted to read a book where the world jumps off the pages like the first two, not a book which reads like a movie.

In the end though, this book was good, but a few aspects were a bit disappointing. Along with everything above, there are some continuity errors and some very confusing aspects to the novel. Candy and Boa have issues at the beginning of the novel and you never figure out how this conflict started. In the second book, Boa calls Candy "sister". This conflict was just quite sudden.

But, for me, a lot of issues of this book were made up with the cliffhanger at the end which made me so pumped for the next novel. Barker is taking us on a fun ride, and even though this book may not be up to par, I still enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to all people who enjoyed the first two novels.

The third book seems to be written by someone else other than Clive Barker. The writing style is Mr. Barker's no doubt, beautifully dark and poetic as always, but the third story of Candy and the Abarat seems to be told from someone who only has a casual idea of what happened in the first two books. The magic and beauty isn't there. It's like someone took Mr. Barker's notes an tried their darndest to continue the story without much imagination or heart. As someone pointed out in earlier review, their are gaps and flaws in the plot and character development. Ideas come and go seemingly at random just to keep a story going that was on the right track before, but now is lost and rambling. The history of Boa and Candy seems to have been rewritten for this book. That's the main thing that really disrupted my enjoyment of Absolute Midnight. That and the sudden stowaway love interest that came out nowhere and left me feeling like a Geshrat in the cold. This book just felt wrong from page one. Nontheless, I will read the next books if only out of curiosity, but unless the writer of Absolute Midnight finds his heart again, I cannot say I'm really looking forward to the adventure like I was in the first two books.

My apologies, as this review will not be helpful to most people. I have literally just recieved this book, and I couldn't believe the heft of the package when I picked it up. I was expecting a pretty scrawny book, based upon the $13.98 pre-order price from amazon, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it easily surpasses the first two volumes of this series in size, and is once again chock full of Mr. Barker's original artwork (125 plates...worth the book price alone!) I buy the majority of my books for the Kindle nowadays, but since I am anal about my book collections being all in the same format, I of course had to buy this in hardcover since I have the first two volumes of the series in hardcover (plus the horror and the color would be lost on the artwork for the Kindle). In this day and age of ever increasing e-book prices (example: Stephen King's 11/22/63, which sells for $16.99 for the un-enhanced version!), -which from what I've read is largely due to Apple somehow able to apply pressure to the book publishers so the i-pad could be a more competitive e-reader- it is incredibly refreshing to know you can still get your money's worth once in a while, and in this case, even more. If anything, Clive Barker has a right to charge MORE for a book such as this, since he also puts so much of his original artwork in it as well. So, Thank you so much Mr. Barker, Harper publishing and amazon.com for this tremendous value!!!

Let me start by saying Im a huge Barker fan and have been for many years. I own, and re-read every year a large number of his books. I adore Abarat I and II. Adore them! I re-read them right before I started Absolute Midnight so my memory was refreshed. Then I read Absolute Midnight: what the heck happened? I am hugely dissapointed. Its all over the place: far too many new characters, evil creatures, weapons and magic cul-de-sacs to navigate. Dont get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with new characters etc. I just felt bombarded. I would have hardly had a paragraph behind me to wrap my head around a new complication when something else would come out of right field. So many new beasties came out, I cant keep them all straight. Candy changed in this book. She stopped being my hero, and just became a girl. I was often confused about what came out of her mouth or her head. She seems to have lost her admirable characteristics and become very two-dimensional. My biggest gripe is that suddenly, and to me, completely inexpicably, Boa has become evil all of the sudden. WHUH????? This happened fairly early in the book and threw me for a huge, nasty loop. Has Clive read the first two books? How does he not remember that in those two books Boa was consistently painted as a lovely, benovolent almost saintly soul? As far as I can tell there was never an inkling that Boa was rotten. On top of that, all of the admirable characters in the book spend time speaking of just how fantastic she is, how wonderful. The entire vehicle of the series is the fact that the Fantomaya thought Boa was so priceless, they stole her soul and put her in Candy to save her. Then, suddenly Book 3: Boa's a raving b**** and actively tries to kill Candy and anyone else who gets in her way. This is the equivilent, to me, of Dumbeldore turning around and trying to stab Harry Potter himself. Oh! Did we forget to mention he's evil and has always supported Voldemort????? I'll say it again: WHUH? It makes NO sense. Then, Candy gets in a huge battle with her, which just kind of ends with Candy just walking away and leaving Boa, despite the fact that Candy knows how dangerous she is. Then there's a really tacked-on love at first sight plot that springs out of nowhere. Like: "Oh, Did I forget to have Candy fall in love? Better squeeze that in!" The paintings are great as usual although sometimes I feel a character was written after the painting was made and just inserted somewhere into the story. I could go on and on. The fact is, I read purely for enjoyments sake... I dont read books that make me feel as though Im on a forced march to the end to see if somehow it all ties together and the ending makes it worth it. If Im not enjoying the moments of the books, the prose or the characters, I wont continue. Im through with these Im afraid. I wont bother reading the next two books that come out. (Whenever that may be: 2025 perhaps?)

This book flows on beautifully from the last volume, and there are plenty of unexpected revelations. Nice to see the main character evolving and growing up, too. The only problem is how long I'm going to have to wait for the final instalment!

Even though I waited a long time for the third installment of the Abarat series, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Even as an adult reader now, I was young when I started to read the series when it was new, I still found the book packed full of excitement, and interesting plot twists. I'd say that for anyone who has read and enjoyed the previous two books, that they really need to keep going with the series. I loved the character development, and the introduction of new characters who helped mix things up. I can only hope that the fourth and fifth books in this series don't take as long to release as this one did.

In the seven years we waited for this book, two things were said pretty consistently. One: it's coming soon. Two: It will be darker than the first two. One of these things was true. It was much darker than the first two.

Because there was such a long wait between this book and the last, I decided to re-read both books one and two, something I rarely do. I was glad I did, because it brought me back in to the world of the Abarat. Book 1 is important in terms of set-up, and book 2 really picks up on the action and adventure. Book three hit the ground running.

Though this is a long book, as with the others it is filled with incredible artwork so it's not as long as it appears. It is surprisingly fast-paced and filled with amazing creatures and scenarios such as only Barker can create. It's incredibly original. Candy matures, some mysteries are solved, bonds are strengthened, and we are given a lot to think about in future books.

I absolutely recommend this series. In hardcover if you can get it. The Kindle versions (at least of books 1 and 2) have no art, and that's part of what makes these books so special.

Incidentally, though the main character Candy Quackenbush is only 16, I don't necessarily think of this as a children's or even young adult series. This book was more mature, and definitely scarier than the first two. I'm not saying it's not suitable for young adults, but there's definitely the stuff of nightmares in here.

And so the anticipation begins again. I understand that most of the art work for books 4 and 5 is completed and that book 4 is already in the works. When we'll see it - who knows!? But this one was worth the wait.

It's been a long wait for Absolute Midnight and for the Abarat series to continue, and even as a big fan of Barker's, you can't help but wonder after any wait like that if the new book will live up to your hopes, or if it will be a satisfactory continuation of the series. Well, Absolute Midnight delivers, and then some. Be forewarned: the title should give you a clue about how dark this book is, but even it won't prepare you; if the first books pushed a little against their YA categorization, Absolute Midnight demolishes it, delivering some premium grade nightmares of almost every variety imaginable, from Lovecraftian deep sea dwellers to horrific alien gods, from children's souls being trapped for eternity to brutal infanticide, from mob rule executions to dismemberment of heroic characters. The series has been building towards the plunging of the Abarat into an unnatural midnight, and characters have warned about the horrors that could be released, but so many of us have been tamed by YA authors that it's a little shocking to find a book that pulls almost no punches in its depiction of the living hell that the villainous Mater Motley unleashes here. If there's a gripe to be had here, it's that the book almost covers too much ground; from the birth of the Requiax to the return of some old friends, from Candy's conflict with the suddenly (and, to be frank, a little abruptly) evil Princess Boa to the revelations of Mater Motley's allegiances, Absolute Midnight covers a ton of ground, and feels a little rushed at points. At the same time, it's clear that whatever time Barker took to write the book paid off, as his imagination is still in full bloom, even if it's now turned to hellish visions rather than a wondrous new world. The ending is every bit the cliffhanger I dreaded, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't satisfied, or that I wouldn't be buying the next book in the series on the first day I possibly could. At the same time, given how unrelentingly bleak and dark Absolute Midnight is, maybe it's good to go find something a little happier to read for a bit. But let me be plain here: though it may be a little rushed, as a fan of the first two books, I loved this one; it feels as though Barker is finally letting all of the seeds he's planted burst into bloom, and doing so in a far more brutally effective way than I expected.