Jess Wong and Angie Redmond are best friends, but Jess wants more from their relationship. Afraid of ruining their friendship, Jess hasn't said anything. Then Angie meets someone, a girl named Margot who steals from the cafe Angie works at while flirting with her. The situation instantly makes Jess hate Margot and creates a rift between best friends when Angie starts to date Margot. As Angie is drawn more and more into Margot's circle, Margot's best friend Ryan disappears and no one seems to know what happened.
A Line in the Dark is a dark contemporary teen novel that accurately shows the growing pains of friendship and the pain of unrequited love. Jess isn't the nicest person, but being inside her head feels authentic. She's not idealized or perfect and it's nice to see an accurate depiction of someone's inner thoughts and feelings. Jess loves Angie, but either doesn't want to ruin their friendship or is too afraid of rejection to reveal her feelings. As with any friendship that has one of the members finding first love, the relationship becomes strained when Margot and Angie date in addition to the gnawing jealousy Jess feels. Margot starts to keep secrets, dresses differently, wears more makeup, and starts to adopt Margot's mean girl tendencies. Jess starts to dig into Margot and Ryan's secrets to discredit them and get Margot back. She does turn into a bit of a stalker, following Margot and Angie around. My favorite part of Jess is her art. She draws in an anime style and has a fully realized world with ciphers for herself, Margot, and Angie to work out her feelings. It also led to some interesting revelations within her art that had a large impact on the story.
The lesbian characters are all varied and not portrayed as all evil or all good, but some sort of shade of grey in between. Angie at first seems like a genuine person, but she turns out to be extremely manipulative and pitting Jess against Margot to get what she wants. At first, we see her through Jess and her crush, so she is shown idealized, perfect in every way. Margot is a bit of a mean girl even when the Jess hate filter is taken away. She and Ryan seem to spread rumors about people and destroy their reputations for crossing them. Ryan has a secret affair with a teacher, exposed by the letter they leave for each other in the woods. I really hated how this abusive relationship was shown as totally fine and understandable. Maybe it's because it was from the point of view of high school students who see themselves as more adult, but it's not great to tell your target audience that affairs with teachers are ok.
The mystery with Ryan's disappearance makes the book take a turn. Suddenly, there are gaps in Jess's narrative and we don't know what actually happened the night of a party when Jess finds and picks up a gun and fights with Ryan. The interviews with the police are shown in transcription form and the stories Angie, Jess, and Margot tell are weirdly and similarly cagey. They all also don't seem affected at all by Ryan's disappearance when it hits rather close to home. While the mystery was interesting, the story didn't have much tension leading up to the reveal. The twists are laid out rather casually and the ending has a bizarre change from first person narration from Jess's point of view to third person omniscient. It was jarring, unnecessary, and distracted from the story. The reveal makes sense and blew my mind a little bit. It was unexpected and not at all satisfying.
A Line in the Dark shows a toxic lesbian love triangle going to extremes. While I liked the overall story, I felt that more tension could have been built. Classifying it as a thriller makes it seem like there is something missing. Maybe it was purposeful to show something about Jess, but there were quite a few runon sentences that just annoyed me. I read the book over the course of two day. I was enthralled and the pace is quick. However, the move from first to theird person felt super awkward and the reveal made me so angry. I enjoyed most of the book and I appreciate it, but I wouldn't revisit it.
My rating: 3/5 fishmuffins
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