Straight On 'Til Morning Paperback – September 5, 2006

Being thirteen - almost fourteen - has its own special anguish. You know more than you should, you want more than you can have, and nothing quite makes sense. Such was the life of Kevin Murphy, caught in the long summer before maturity. Falling out of love one day and back in love the next. This time with his best friend Nicole French. Nikki is older, but not particularly wiser. Compulsively drawn to high-risk boyfriends, she can care for Kevin, rely on him, but never love him in the way he wants.
What hurts Kevin the most is that Nikki has fallen for a boy that Kevin knows is extreme bad news. Peter Starling first ran into Kevin and his friends on a day in the woods. What started out as and idyllic party suddenly became a near nightmare, and Kevin will never forget Pete's menacing look. Suddenly Nikki is gone along with Peter - Kevin's last sight of her was as she flew across the sky with Peter and his cronies. Kevin's determination to save her will lead him and his close friends over a boundary that humans are not to pass, and suddenly the teenager's life is filled with horror.
Author Christopher Golden makes it clear in his author's note that this tale is a fantasy remembrance of a part of his childhood. We are left to decide which pieces are imagination and which were real, but the basic theme of love gained and then lost is universal to all possible worlds. Underneath the sometimes frightening and tragic written story is a sense of a deeper tragedy - that of decisions never made and opportunities lost. In the course of a short novel space summer ends and the cold of mid-winter suddenly begins.
Golden's writing is a combination of fact pacing and almost elegiac musings on the changing hare of a boy. I do not know of anything else he has written that has so much running just beneath the surface. Speaking non-technically, it is a moving, thought-provoking story, one that will remain in memory for a time. Technically, "Straight on 'til Morning" begins slowly. So much time is spent building the characters and setting the scene that it seems there is hardly the time to bring the story home. This is one case where I feel the book is just too short for what it attempts to do. But this is far better than being too long. This is still one of Golden's best effort, and is clearly a book he needed to write.

This is the first time I have read anything by Golden. While the book was well written, I couldn't help but feel cheated after having finished it.
The book tells the story of 13 year old Kevin Murphy, whose day to day existence is disrupted by the entrace of Peter and Doug Starling and their friends. When you first meet this quartet of bad boys, they seem like nothing more than that, a bunch of teen-agers out looking for trouble. But when Pete and Nikki, Kevin's friend and unknowningly the object of his affections, we begin to see that there might be more to Peter Starling and company than meets the eye, because around them, as Kevin comments, impossible things always seem to happen. Kevin knows that Pete and his buddies are no good, as are most of the guys that Nikki has dated in the past, and Nikki has always been closed to whatever Kevin has to say until her heart is broken. But the frustrating part for Kevin is that he wants Nikki for himself, and he feels that if he tries to expose Pete for what he really is, while at the same time confessing his own true feelings for Nikki, she might think that that was his true motive for trying to break up her and Pete.
When Kevin is finally pressured by his friends and brother, it's literally too late. Nikki has been totally won over by Pete and, as wild as she had been in the past, has decided that he will be the one she will go all the way with for the first time. Kevin's timing is perfect, as they are interrupted before Nikki has the opportunity to make the mistake of a life time. But in the process, Kevin is beaten to the point of passing out by Doug and friends. As he awakens, the books leaps from reality into the realm of fantasy (it's about time), as Kevin hears "second to the right and straight on 'til morning." He sees five people flying past the moon, and one of them he knows is Nikki. Thus starts the real adventure, as Kevin persuades his brother and friends to go with him as they head off to Neverland to rescue Nikki.
How they get there and what happens there I will not reveal. As already mentioned, the book is well written, but I feel it took too long to get to the meat of the matter. You are half-way through the book before you get to Neverland, and the action that takes place there is over way too quickly. The book is full of believable characters, even in Neverland, where everything is magical, and there's even an unexpected surprise -- keep an eye on April as the book progresses. For me, the book would have been better if the trip to Neverland had come sooner, and the action that takes place there had lasted longer. It may not have been Golden's intention, but this concept could very easily have been drawn out to a number of books, a possible trilogy, almost a "Kevin's Adventures in Wonderland."

I found this on a library book sale cart at work years ago, and I didn't expect much from it. It was so well-written and creepy that I gave my copy to Goodwill after I finished reading it! A decade later, I was dying to read it again, and the unique premise, tight prose and realistic characters didn't disappoint. I can't wait to check out some of Christopher Golden's other work.

This book reminded me of a cheesy after school special.. or one of those live-action Saturday morning adventure shows that were around in the late 70's/early 80's (think "Land of the Lost"). Sure, the author tries to add maturity to the book, simply by adding (gasp) curse words and naughty lines. Oh, the horrah! But in the end, I felt like I was reading a homework assignment for a ninth grader's "Creative Writing" class.
The story starts out on a fairly decent pace. Suddenly things get jumbled together and the reader is plunged into a typical fantasy world that makes "Welcome to Pooh Corner" look downright creative and spooky. I just couldn't buy into fantasy creatures named "Curt" and "Doug". Also, maybe I'm naive and ignorant, but reading about 13 year olds who go out drinking every night seems equally far-fetched. I see how this book can appeal to fans of "Buffy" and other WB shows... but hey, if that's your cup of tea, then grab a saucer and a cup for a big serving of lame adventure.
The author also notes that a few of these things really happened to him as a kid. That may be why the first 200-some pages are spent detailing teen love, and the last 100 are spent on the rushed fantasy shlop. Ya write what ya know, I guess.

I was bored with it,sadly not what I expected!😩