Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - All the Things We Do in the Dark

The premise of the book is wonderful, but I didn’t enjoy the execution. The side characters were incredibly two dimensional, and I believe the author was aiming for an unreliable narrator situation, but it fell flat.

The love interest, frankly, has no personality. She’s just nice—which, of course, is a wonderful thing to be—but we know nothing else about her. She likes weight training, her father is a cop, and she’s kind.

The main character’s best friend, Syd, is shown being a poor friend in multiple scenarios, and although it seems as though she was an amazing friend at one time, the readers never really see that side of her. I honestly didn’t care that she was being a bad friend. I just wanted her to leave Ava, the main character, alone.

It is eventually revealed that Syd’s been in love with Ava the whole time, which wasn’t very shocking. Her hostility makes more sense, but I couldn’t really feel bad for her—I didn’t know anything about her.

Syd’s personality was mostly tattoos and dating a new person every other week. I wanted to like her, truly, but there wasn’t much to like. She didn’t have much personality. Her parents were never mentioned; I don’t know if she had siblings. I don’t know her hobbies. There was nothing to her.

I was glad that the book dealt with such serious topics and that the main characters were queer, but diversity was lacking otherwise. I believe the love interest is half-Korean, but it was never really touched on.

The pacing of this book was bizarre, which was perhaps intentional seeing as the narrator seems to have a warped perception of time herself.

Additionally, for a good portion of the book, the readers are led to believe that the murderer is a boy named Nick who, amazingly (/sarcasm), is the only character with any disability. He has a stutter. While it turns out he’s actually one of the “good guys,” the apparent demonization of a disabled person for about 100 pages was enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Overall, I would rate this book a 2/5. The writing was beautiful at times, and the main character’s struggles and her personal growth were intense, inspiring, and never sugar-coated, which I truly appreciate, but the execution was poor. I didn’t care for the side characters, and

I was mostly left wondering why this character was so wrapped up in another girl’s death but doing nothing to attempt to solve it.

I would not recommend this book.

Content Warnings

More...