A Line in the Dark by Malinda Lo

When I first heard about A Line in the Dark, I was eager to jump into reading it.  With the creepy cover and the synopsis that promised a slightly creepy story that was bound to keep me on the edge of my seat, I was super intrigued about what this book was going to have in store for me.

There were a lot of things that I really enjoyed about A Line in the Dark, including how amazing the writing was, (more on that in just a moment), as well as how the plot progressed.  There were also a few things I didn’t like all that much, such as how the book kind of changed from first person point of view to third in the second half of the book (I don’t know why, I just hate abrupt changes like that, but that’s more my taste instead of something being an issue with the book itself), and how the ending kind of confused me a bit more than if it had ended differently.

Jess and Angie have been best friends for ages – they do pretty much everything together, and Jess has secretly been in love with Angie for as long as she can remember.  Angie, of course, never really notices how she feels, but instead looks for a girlfriend in other girls – and eventually finds one when she meets Margot, a girl from another fancier school than the one she and Jess attend.  Jess has strange feelings about Margot and her best friend Ryan from the first time she meets them, and they never get along.  Ryan and Margot never want to be around Jess, and Jess believes that Margot and her circle are bad news for Angie, which of course causes tension between the two best friends.

When a night at a party that both Angie and Jess attend with Margot and her friends goes wrong, someone turns up missing and a murder investigation brings to light quite a few things that no one could see coming.

I really liked Jess’s character at first – she seemed like a great friend to Angie and was loyal, and then things took a strange turn when Jess started getting a stalker-ish thing going on during a fight she had with Angie.  She would sit outside her house and watch her, call her a bunch of times, and it was overall kind of creepy.

I can’t say too much about Angie’s character because I didn’t really feel like we got to know her very well before she started dating Margot, and once she started dating Margot it seemed like she changed into someone who only cared about what she wanted.  Margot’s character was the kind of girl that you loved to hate, and to be honest, I think she was my favorite character in the whole book.

Overall though, from the beginning of the book through the end, I didn’t feel like there was much character development going on – I was really hoping for a kind of a lesson or something to be learned to change some of the characters, but it just didn’t really seem like we got that.

The writing in this book flowed so nicely from one point to the next, creating a story that was hard to put down.  It was truly entertaining and I had an easy enough time following along, and clearly Malinda Lo knows how to capture a reader’s attention, pull them in, and keep them interested until the very last page of her book.  The suspense in A Line in the Dark was perfectly done, and I don’t feel like I have anything negative to say at all about the way the book was written.

I wish the ending would have been a little different – the twist was something I honestly didn’t see coming, nor did I feel like it really fit the book all that well.  It wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, it just isn’t how I would have expected things to turn out.

While I truly liked A Line in the Dark and thought that it was an interesting thriller of a read (especially for the month of October), I did have a few issues with it.  Fortunately, the way the story was written and the mystery really made it worth the read!

If you liked reading my review for this book, check on my stop on the A Line in the Dark blog tour, where I made some black and white cookies!