Book Review: First Night by Tom Weston

Posted by: nightdweller20 on: July 23, 2009

In: book review
Comment!

first night bigger

Publisher: Tom Weston Media

Released: December 31, 2008

From Tom’s website:

Alexandra O’Rourke, aged 16, is not a happy camper. It’s New Year’s Eve. She should be partying in San Diego with her friends, but instead she is stuck in Boston, with just her younger sister, Jackie, for company. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she is being haunted by Sarah, the ghost of a seventeenth century Puritan. Oh, and there is the small matter of the charge of witchcraft to be sorted out.

Armed only with big shiny buttons and a helping of Boston Cream Pie, the sisters set out to restore the Natural Order. Can Alex solve the mystery of the Devil’s Book? Can Jackie help Sarah beat the sorcery rap? And can they do it before the fireworks display at midnight? Because this is First Night – and this is an Alex and Jackie Adventure.

Before reading First Night, I had never heard of the First Night festival before. Never being to Boston before (or anywhere remotely near there), I’ve missed out on what seems to be great fun. For those of you who, like me prior to reading this book, have never been to this festival, it takes place on New Year’s Eve in several places, but Boston celebrates it on a higher scale, much like how Mardi Gras is celebrated most famously in New Orleans.

I found that I was pleasantly satisfied with First Night. It was a fun and lighter read, which I expected, but you can also tell that Weston put a lot of effort into his research. Everything was described with lots of detail, and the modern and historical aspects were meshed well together. Weston spent time developing the time frames, and the characters as well. Jackie and Alex, the two sisters in the story, were really well-developed and unique characters. Which is nice, because I didn’t have to spend time trying to distinguish one from the other. Sarah, the Puritan ghost, provides a lot of the humor through her words and even her actions, which made reading this book fun.