Stars: 4

Author: Kate Thompson

Title: Midnight's Choice

Publisher: Hyperion Press

Year: 1998

ISBN: paperback 0-7868-1266-4;hardcover 0-7868-0381-9

Distribution: PB, HC.

Pages: 236 (HC)

Notes: YA. Sequel to Switchers.

Tess is a Switcher, able to shapeshift to any creature, adopting not merely its appearance but its way of thinking and its very essence. Her ability to Switch, however, will end with her fifteenth birthday; before that event she must decide what form she wants to retain for the rest of her life. In Midnight's Choice, two strange possibilities confront her: a phoenix, the form that her friend Kevin seems to have chosen; and a vampire, the choice of a young man she has never met before.

Kevin's experiences (in the previous book, Switchers) led him to take refuge in becoming a phoenix, which knows neither pain nor care nor friendship. As that creature, Kevin is captured by the head keeper of the Dublin zoo and put on display. The mysterious golden bird is more than just a bird: it is a force for good, and the mere sight of it bestows a sense of peace. But when old Lizzie Larkin, a former Switcher and Tess's friend, learns about the fantastic bird, she knows there is more to it than meets the eye -- and that whenever it came into existence, an evil of comparable magnitude must also have been created.

Tess seeks out the other Switcher she has suddenly sensed in Dublin: it is her duty to tell him he must choose a permanent form before his fifteenth birthday. Besides, only a Switcher will understand the truth about the phoenix in Dublin zoo and how Kevin needs to be freed from his cage -- and his detached mode of existence -- so he can truly choose. But in Martin, Tess finds an even more frightening kind of detachment than Kevin's: a vampire's grim, cold confidence in his own superiority and self-sufficiency. When Martin uses his vampire powers not only to endanger Tess's life but to attack Kevin-as-phoenix, Tess must challenge not only his choice and Kevin's but her own indecision: what does she want to be for the rest of her life?

Certainly a non-traditional vampire novel, Midnight's Choice makes informed use of familiar tropes of vampire fiction. In his vampire persona, Martin commands every rat in the city of Dublin -- including Tess's pet white rat, Algernon -- so he can create a vampire residence for himself in a forgotten underground tomb. Martin also menaces Tess with stereotypical vampire powers: having tasted her blood, he can make her his slave. But Thompson goes further and recognizes the vampire-makings in all of us, using the vampire mentality to represent a human frame of mind. The phoenix and the vampire are set off against each other as not only opposites but complements: by placing Tess in the middle (at one point literally), Thompson shows that becoming an impersonal force for evil is not the opposite of becoming an impersonal force for good: rather, both are equally removed from living a life of human involvement.

Midnight's Choice treats transcendent verities by incorporating the mundane and the fantastic. Tess lives in an everyday world of going to school, getting along with parents, and growing up -- as well as communicating with her rat Algernon, performing surveillance when Switched to a pine marten, and hunting side-by-side with a vampire. Thompson shows the power of both worlds, and how they can influence each other, in the events that lead not only Tess but the other Switchers to their choices.

Reviewed by Catherine B. Krusberg