All the Colors of the Dark
by Chris Whitaker
read by Edoardo Ballerini
Books on Tape, 2024. 14 hours, 37 minutes.
Review written September 15, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
I don’t remember where I found the recommendation that prompted me to put this eaudiobook on hold, but I laughed when I recognized the cover. It turns out, I heard the author speak at ALA Annual Conference 2024, and received a free copy of the print book, signed by the author. But it’s still easier for me to get around to reading it if it’s in my eaudiobooks holds queue. (What can I say? Books I own don’t have a due date, and I can listen while I’m doing other things.)
In the middle of this book, I was going to report that it’s a super sad book, with lots of people making bad choices. But almost unbelievably, it turns out to all come to a satisfying conclusion at the end. I’m saying that up front to encourage other readers to persevere.
It’s a sweeping saga beginning with an unusual boy and girl from small-town America who are each other’s only friend. Patch has only one eye, and his mother helped him deal with that by encouraging him to embrace the identity of a pirate. Patch sometimes steals things, and he’s not popular with the other kids. But when he’s the only person who answers a girl named Saint’s open invitation to visit her beehives – using someone else’s invitation – the two become friends.
But when they’re thirteen, Patch sees a man attacking the girl who’s the queen bee of their class. Patch intervenes, and the girl gets away – but Patch disappears. The only one who continues to look for him – without regard for her own safety – is Saint. Over months, she follows every lead, insistent that Patch is still alive and out there somewhere.
Patch, on his part, is being kept in a completely dark room. He can’t see anything. But there is also a girl there – a girl who tells him how to stay alive, unlike the other girls who were there before him. And in the many hours they’re alone together, she paints pictures in his mind of places she’s been. Her name is Grace, and she is his tether to reality.
But when Saint finally finds Patch, the person who captured him isn’t found – presumed dead, because there’s a fire. But Grace is also missing.
The doctor tells Patch’s mother – who lost the ability to cope with life while Patch was missing – that his mind invented Grace while he was imprisoned in the dark. But that wouldn’t explain all the places Grace described that Patch had never seen before. And it turns out, there are missing girls from those places. So Patch sets out on a quest to find Grace – and the other missing girls as well.
The story’s a saga, and there’s lots more to the book than that. Most of our characters make some bad choices along the way, and fall in love with the wrong people. We follow Patch and Saint across years of searching and years of dealing with the things life throws at them.
And I was surprised how satisfied I was with the ways it all comes together in the end! Believe it or not, even telling you that much, I don’t think I’m giving anything away – that’s just the beginning of how their lives’ courses are set.
So read this book when you’re ready for a saga about friendship and love and persistence and guilt and punishment and protection and painting and the mind’s eye.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/all_the_colors_of_the_dark.html
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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