UK Book Club discussion

Apologies for the late set up this month. Goodreads has changed its notification system and sent me into a void. I've only just caught up.

For November we'll be reading All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker. It was Paul's suggestion and I'm very happy to read it, as I already have it on my to read list...

Read along and join in the chat below. Remember to write 'SPOILERS' at the start of your thread, if you wish to discuss anything that might reveal too much.

Enjoy!

Some books take maybe 80-100 pages to really get up to speed, this one does after 10 lines! I really shouldn’t start reading a book this late on a work day night, really liking the writing style and the perfectly baked descriptive prose… in my opinion! 🙂

Sounds promising!

Just a wonderful hard to put down epic with great characters and a continuous string of gotchas that take a minute to sink in piecing everything together at a fitting end.

Helped remind me to read slower so I could draw pictures from the words, often glad that at the end of the day it was unfinished, and one I will think about often 🙂

I'm about a third of the way through. I like the way this story focuses on the victims and the long term affects of a traumatic experience (rather than the chase to catch the killer/kidnapper). It provides a different perspective from your usual, rather formulaic crime storyline.

That was a long one! How did everyone else get on? I only finished it a few days ago - over spilling into December. Luckily our next book is short (a good thing given how busy many people are around Christmas).

All the Colours of the Dark was a mixed bag for me and I ended up giving it a middling 3 stars. There were things I liked - the emphasis on the long hard slog required to bring certain crimes to a close, the way the people involved, and those close to them, are affected long term - the accumulative collateral damage of the crimes. I felt the characters of Patch and Saint were well drawn and I cared about how the world treated them. But...

Sammy - he's an alcoholic, but it doesn't seem to affect his health/demeanour over the 30+ years covered by the story. Charlotte - is her precociousness (is that a word?) meant to be charming. I just thought she was a brat.

Finally, while I admired the ambition of the novel, I felt the writing just wasn't strong enough to make it great. The author's descriptions often felt, to me, overblown and self-conscious. While much of the research he did into small-town American life, historic events etc. seemed awkwardly shoe-horned in. Sometimes less is more.

From the reviews on Goodreads, I know I'm in the minority - but hey, we can't all agree all of the time!

I have to agree with Liz. I haven't rated it. This is someone who is trying to show the reader how clever he is at writing, the result being that the writer is forefront getting in the way. The premis of the book is good but the execution is inconsistent. The central characters were noticeably more fully formed than others. Like a lot of writers in this genre the pages have been filled with detail that has little or no connection to elsewhere in the book, probably because the structure was not thought out or solid enough to hold the needed word count.
I won't be reading the author again.