An Intense, Pressure-Pounding Thriller/Mystery That Is Grounded with Compassion and Caring
This psychological thriller by Chris Whitaker is by turns frightening and gentle, heartbreaking and heartwarming. It reached out and grabbed my heart (and sometimes my throat) and wouldn't let go.
It's 1975 in Monta Clare, Missouri. Joseph Macauley, 13, is nicknamed Patch because he was born with only one eye and wears a patch, something his mother told him from a young age made him a pirate. He and his mother are desperately poor. Patch's only friend is Saint Brown, an orphan with big glasses and ill-fitting clothes, who lives with her widowed grandmother. Saint is fascinated with nature—from bees to birds. Both Patch and Saint endure much ridicule from their classmates and the townspeople.
One day as Patch is cutting through the woods on his way to school, Patch hears a girl scream—a frightened, terrified scream. He runs toward it to find that Misty Meyer, the most popular girl in school who is from the wealthiest family in town, is being assaulted by a strange man. Patch intervenes, which allows Misty to run away, but Patch is captured by the demon. He awakens in a pitch black room and quickly realizes there is someone else in the room with him, a girl named Grace. She tells him that she is the only one who has survived this brutal man's killing spree of teenage girls. And Grace says she has done this by loudly reciting biblical scriptures whenever the man—Eli Aaron—comes near them.
Meanwhile, Saint is obsessed with finding Patch, and even though she is only a young teenager, she nags and prods the police to do more. It's not a spoiler to say that Patch is rescued (although I won't reveal the drama behind it) because the rest of the book is about both Patch and Saint's mutual obsession with finding abducted girls—even if all they find are their bones. Everything these two become and do as adults is determined by this one act of evil perpetrated on young Patch that day in the woods.
As much as this is a page-turning thriller/mystery, it is also a perceptive novel about human endurance when hope is all there is—and even when there isn't much of that. It is a story about the many kinds of love that keep us all alive.
This is an intense read, sometimes a pressure-pounding and unsettling read, because the subject matter is so chilling and formidable. But through it all, it is grounded in compassion and caring.
And the ending? Let's just say is surprising, astounding, and very (very!) good.
True to the title, this book presents a palette of colors through words, painting mind-pictures with color names that reach far beyond our typical lexicon, from ochre to titanium white, from viridian to carbon black, from cardinal to mulberry. In fact, the descriptions of color—from a young woman's eyes to a church's stained glass windows—are breathtaking. I've never read anything like it.
Not only is the novel filled with color symbolism, but also colors serve as a metaphor for finding a greater meaning in life when all is covered in darkness.
(06/29/26)
