This review will include light spoilers for the beginning of “All the Colors of the Dark”
Introduction
Recently, my friends invited me to join their new book club. While the prospect of being a part of it was exciting, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace of one book a month while attending school. I denied the invite, and they read Steven King’s “The Running Man” without me. (I wasn’t too upset by this admittedly). However, when they told me the next book: “All the Colors of the Dark”, was a decade spanning saga that bounces genres around like “Knives Out”, I was all in. 50 pages a day for twelve days was more than doable I decided.
I finished the book in only nine days.
“All the Colors of the Dark” primarily follows Patch, a spirited, one-eyed boy obsessed with pirates. In the same breath as Patch’s introduction, we are also told that on this sunny day in 1975, Patch was going to be tragically stabbed.
Ooooh, that’s how you draw me in.
What follows is a tale obsessed with death. It lurks around every corner and plagues the characters’ thoughts. Every theme the story portrays is always interspersed with death and mourning, or at least, that’s how I decided to understand it.
Timeless
“All the Colors of the Dark” took me back to my days in junior high reading books like “The Outsiders”. A time when the exploration of the themes were more so baked into the reading experience. Is Patch a good person? Why does Saint’s understanding of anger shift throughout the book? (Saint is another major character that is the same age as Patch.) Is God an active participant in the story? Readers are free to take these questions and find their own answers.
Chris Whitaker, the author of the book, has a prose that does an excellent job at not leaving the reader confused while leaving plenty of room for interpretation. Admittedly, I did not like his writing style at first. I felt there were too many run-on-sentences that were difficult to understand. After enough time soaking his writing style, it became almost cinematic.
Chapters are very short, on average about two pages long, so each new chapter felt like switching scenes in a tv show. It made the book addicting to read, leading to me finishing it much sooner than I had expected.
Misplaced Stroke
In all honesty, I don’t really know how to talk about this subject, but the way Chris Whitaker wrote the female characters in this story seems… bad. The other POV character besides Patch, is Saint. Saint is a girl, later a woman, that is defined by the men in her life. Without going into spoilers, there is almost always a man driving her actions, beliefs, and rebellions. The beginning of the book made Saint seem like the second protagonist. Someone with a strong identity that was going to be driving the story. Instead she, and most of the other women, are seemingly dragged around by all the men in the story. It was disappointing for me to read, but fortunately it didn’t ruin the book for me.
And Varnish
‘All the Colors of the Dark’ was a wonderful experience for me to read. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even after I turned the last page. My friends in the book club shared my enthusiasm for the book as well, but for largely different reasons. They latched onto the religious aspects of the book, (the book takes place largely in a small, christian town), and they left it having their faith seemingly strengthened. Personally, I didn’t even think of the religious themes until they brought it up. I thought it was cool we could have such different appreciation for the book. I think that speaks to the quality of the thing.
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