A Line in the Dark

by Malinda Lo

Jessica Wong is the kind of girl nobody notices. She's also the kind of girl who sees everything. There's no one better at overlooking Jess than her best friend, Angie. Jess can live without Angie knowing her real feelings, just so long as they're best friends. But when Angie meets Margot, Jess recognises that things will never be the same. Worse still, Margot is one of the rare people who sees exactly how Jess feels about Angie. As Angie falls hard for Margot and gets caught up with Margot's wealthy friends, Jess's life begins to fall apart. If she isn't Angie's best friend, what is she? Then, at a party, surrounded by Margot's friends, Jess finally breaks down and starts revealing a few of the secrets she knows. Not everyone in the party can handle what Jess reveals, and before the sun rises, someone's dead. Dark, disturbing, and full of twists, A Line in the Dark is a cleverly crafted YA mystery that will delight readers craving a queer teenage girl antihero just as morally complicated as her male counterparts.

• ISBN10: 073522742X
• ISBN13: 9780735227422
• Publish Date: 17 October 2017
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 21 December 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Dutton Books for Young Readers
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780735227422

Reviews

[Angie]

I am so confused about my feelings for A Line the Dark. On one hand, I could not put it down! I was hooked! I had to know who killed Ryan why! On the other hand, it utilizes one of my least favorite tropes to up the suspense which left me annoyed with the climax. Then the epilogue happened and I was just left confused, because the series of events doesn't quite line up. Maybe that's on purpose? Unreliable narrator? I don't know, but I didn't like that.

A Line in the Dark starts with best friends, Jess and Angie, at the start of a new school year. Angie starts dating one of the girls from the local boarding school, and Jess is not happy about this. She has her reasons, but it puts a strain on their relationship. The relationship between Jess and Margot is also tense, because the girls just cannot get along, even for Angie's sake. It all comes to a head during a party, which is when events get muddled, and Margot's friend Ryan turns up dead. Who saw Ryan last? Who was the last to talk to her? Did someone drive her somewhere? No one knows!

Jess is the narrator for about the first half of the book. We really get to see her feelings toward all of these girls. It's messy, but does that make her a murderer? Someone is trying to make it seem that way. However, once we start getting the police transcripts, Jess' narration turns from first-person to third-person. That is never a good sign. It always means that our narrator knows something that we're not suppose to know yet. Why couldn't the entire book have been in third-person to avoid this suspicious flip? It just didn't work out, especially because the truth comes out in one of the transcripts and not in the narration anyway. Then the epilogue goes back to Jess' first-person account and doesn't line up with her previous chapters.

A Line in the Dark really was awesome, except for the odd narration change in the middle. I was definitely hooked by the mystery and invested in Jess' story. I just wish the ending had hit me harder. The narration change took some of the momentum away and didn't make the epilogue the surprise it should have been.