All the Colours of the Dark

I was looking forward to reading this having really enjoyed We Begin at the End, and it didn’t disappoint me. This story is told in a more chronologically normal way than that one with it starting at the beginning in 1975 and working its way forward in chunks; we come back to the characters every five or ten years and see where they are now. It’s difficult to review the book without giving things away as the story doesn’t really get going for a while after the start of the book, though it’s interesting from the beginning. The two main characters are Patch, not his real name, but the nickname of a boy with one eye, and Saint, a friend of his who lives with her grandmother and, among other things, keeps bees. The first section which introduces you to them as young teenagers is titled “The Pirate and the Beekeeper”.

Like We Begin at the End we follow a whole cast of characters in the same small town for many years. When writing about that book I commented that I found people staying in the same place for thirty years a bit odd, I guess here it made more sense because the story was told forwards so we saw their motivations for staying put as they happened. I enjoyed the story but it did seem to hit a lot of the same themes and character points as the earlier book. But that really wasn’t a problem and it was another excellent read. Maybe it ran a bit long and ambled through a load of unnecessary things but I thought that all added to the story and I really enjoyed the writing style so I was very happy to spend a longer time in the company of the characters.