All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker is unforgettable. I haven't written anything on this blog for five days because I've been immersed in Saint and Patch's lives. This book has it all. It's a thriller, for sure. It's a police story. It's a romance. It's a murder mystery. It makes you re-think your perceptions of right and wrong. You see two sides of every event.
I call it a pro-life story because the political debate between abortion and pro-life is mentioned, here and there, but when the story moves on and you see it in itself is the defacto debate.
Where to begin?
Style--beautiful prose. There are images that are poetic. I love short chapters.
Plot--A teenager saves a girl's life. He is kidnapped and kept captive but saved by his best friend. While captive, he is befriended and falls in love with another captive. The rest of the novel is a search for this captive girl.
Theme--The effects of traumas on people and their relationships with others.
Setting--Mostly Missouri but all over the USA.
Characters--Patch, boy who was born with one eye.
Saint, Patch's best friend.
Nix, Police chief
Sammy--Humorous foil in the story.
Norma--Saint's Grandmother
Tooms--doctor in the town
Misty--Patch's crush
Grace-illusive captive
Eli Aaron--bad guy
The book begins with two young teens. Patch is often bullied because he's poor, skinny, has a patch on an eye, and his mother is a druggie. Saint's parents have died and she lives with her grandmother. Saint is a beekeeper and a generous person who befriends Patch and feeds him when she can.
Patch saves Misty from being abducted. Misty lives. And. Patch is gone!!!!! They find his patch on the ground, but no sign of him. Misty confides to Saint that even though her abductor was wearing a mask, she recognized the eyes of Dr. Tooms.
After the townspeople give up looking for Patch, Saint never does. She also keeps a wary eye on Dr. Tooms.
Meanwhile, a girl is missing.
One day, Saint brings in some film to be developed and talks to the clerk. He tells her to stay away from the photographer, Eli Aaron. He's creepy. Saints scopes Aaron out and becomes convinced that Eli Aaron kidnaps girls and maybe Patch.
Saint goes to Eli Aaron's on a pretense and snoops around looking for evidence. Somehow, the house catches on fire and Police Chief Nix finds Saint and they find Patch. Eli Aaron escaped.
Patch tells them about a girl named Grace, who was kept down the basement with him. They don't know whether to believe him or not.
More girls are missing. Dr. Tooms is arrested and sentenced to life.
Life goes on. Misty and Patch become an item. Saint has a boyfriend, Jimmy. Patch takes over his mother's house cleaning jobs to earn money. One time, while cleaning Sammy's art gallery, Sammy takes an interest in Patch. It turns out that Patch is a talented artist. He paints Grace. He paints all the places, Grace talks about. He also paints all the missing girls. He and Sammy spread the portraits to help find the girls. Organizations spring up to look for the girls. If Patch sells a portrait, he donates the money to an organization that looks for missing girls.
Patch quits school at sixteen and works in mines. His muscles fill out. He grows taller. In fact, he is very handsome, and his patch makes him look interesting and exotic. It's an asset.
The night of Misty's prom, her father secretly has a talk with Patch. He pays him a substantial amount of money to break off the relationship. Patch takes it because he knew that he and Misty came from different worlds and would never be a good match. With the money, Patch buys his mother's house and now their landlord will never bother them, again.
Misty is devasted that Patch dropped her. But it is the end, for now.
Patch takes off, working here and there, to get by, while he searches for his Grace.
Saint takes a job working for the police with Chief Nix. She still keeps tabs on what's going on with Patch.
Misty is going to Harvard. For kicks, she takes a job in a bar. Patch, working as a lobsterman, goes into that very bar. Misty and Patch reconnect. Patch moves on but has left Misty pregnant.
When Patch needs money and he doesn't have a job, he robs banks. Patch gives the money to organizations looking for missing girls. Saint who is working for the FBI now, captures him and Patch is sent to prison.
Saint marries Jimmy. Jimmy turns out to be a bad husband. He doesn't like Saint working for the FBI. When Saint becomes pregnant she doesn't know what to do. She considers abortion, and the reader is led to believe that she did kill the baby. She gives it up for adoption and gets a divorce. There is mention, here and there, in the story, of anti-abortion protestors.
When Patch comes out of prison, he goes home. One day, he sees Misty with a young girl and knows instantly that this girl is his own daughter. Her name is Charlotte. Misty has cancer.
When Misty dies, Patch becomes her caretaker. But when Patch meets Jimmy, Saint's "ex", Patch punches him out, for the way he treated Saint. Jimmy hits his head and dies. Patch is in prison again.
While Patch is in prison, he hears a fellow prison describe his hometown, and it sounds exactly where Grace lived. When Patch asked the inmate what the name of the town was, he was shocked to hear, "Grace, Alabama." Patch instantaneously knew that was where Grace was. He had to see it.
The rest of the story would be a spoiler. Sorry.
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