Up All Night (anthology)

When everyone else goes to bed, the ones who stay up feel like they’re the only people in the world. As the hours tick by deeper into the night, the familiar drops away and the unfamiliar beckons. Adults are asleep, and a hush falls over the hum of daily life. Anything is possible.

It’s a time for romance and adventure. For prom night and ghost hunts. It’s a time for breaking up, for falling in love—for finding yourself.

Stay up all night with these thirteen short stories from bestselling and award-winning YA authors like Karen McManus, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nina LaCour, and Brandy Colbert, as they take readers deep into these rarely seen, magical hours.

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Short stories and I have a...difficult relationship. Some I've absolutely loved. Some feel like a piece carved out of a bigger story, more like an excerpt than a story in themselves. Sometimes anthologies are strung together on the thinnest of wires. In this one, the connecting fact is that everything happens at night, when most people are asleep and the world shines in a different way.

As with most anthologies, I enjoyed some stories more than others. One or two left me a bit perplexed, but I was never less than interested in any of them. The story about the asylum was the most confusing to me, as I wasn't sure exactly what was happening even at the end, but the writing was strong enough to hold my interest even then. There's some clever use of those emptier, quieter hours throughout the book, stories that simply couldn't happen in daylight.

There's plenty here to satisfy any tastes, and it's great at helping a reader to find authors they might not have known about before. I know I've added a couple to my 'interested in' list. Fantastic all around.

Up All Night publishes on the 13th of July, 2021. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.