Review : Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik
Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik
Pages : 336
Genre : Mystery
Stand alone
My Rating : 3/5
About the Book :
Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer.
My Thoughts :
Dark Rooms was an intriguing novel, fur sure. From the early start its setting is unsettling, with Grace struggling hard with her grief over her sister’s death. The girls looked alike but couldn’t have been more different, yet Grace knew enough about her sister to know something else must have been going on: certainly, the killer still roams free.
Sure enough, Grace quickly discovers that Hartford isn’t all it seems to be, and its inhabitants all harbor their share of secrets. It’s no wonder everything changed after Nica’s death: her friends aren’t her friends anymore, her family is broken, and she herself has struggled with drugs. The atmosphere in Hartford is heavy, gloomy, icky at times, extremely pessimistic and not always well balanced, and consequently, it’s hard to get attached to Hartford and its characters.
Because of this, it also felt to me as if the book was sitting on an uncomfortable chair between young adult mystery and adult thriller. Grace is as young and stupid as any YA protagonist, but the way the story is treated reminded me more of literary fiction. Personal boundaries, for instance, are quite uncomfortable in Dark Rooms. There’s a complexity to it, but it’s never really discussed or nuanced, and left for the reader to analyse. That’s good with me, but it definitely placed the book in the adult category for me.
The book also provides a continuous strand of secrets! and twists!, yet the whole thing felt very passive and slow-moving. I wanted to know who the killer was, find out what happened to Grace after a certain event, see where all of this would lead. In the end, I felt satisfied with most of the answers, even though I was disappointed by some of the decisions taken.
All in all, Dark Rooms wasn’t a bad book; it simply didn’t click as I would have loved. I have no problem with weird characters and uncomfortable themes, and I don’t need to love a narrator; but I do need to feel hooked somehow, and it didn’t really happen here. Some of the weirdness felt forced, and I felt bored rather than shocked or entertained. Fortunately, the author’s writing was pleasant and carried me along quickly to the end. I’d certainly like to see what she writes next.
I felt the same way. I really enjoyed the story but struggled with some elements within it. She has the potential to be an excellent author, I think. It will be curious what happens with her future novels.
Ah! I’m glad to know I wasn’t the only one struggling a little with it. I fully agree on the author’s potential, though. Something in her voice was very compelling!