Ahoy there mateys!  Though the First Mate and I have very different reading tastes, occasionally we do recommend books to each other.  He and I both read the following:

darkly (Marisha Pessl)

We listened to (independently) and talked about the audiobook and I enjoyed his viewpoint so I ordered asked him to write a review.  So you get one from me and a bonus additional review from me crew.  Please note that I write like I talk and the First Mate writes like he thinks.  Hope you enjoy!

Side Note:  The First Mate preordered the audiobook but I also received an eArc from the publisher, Delacorte Press, in exchange for an honest review.  I thank them for the e-book even though I listened to it :)

From the Captain:

I really loved the last book I read by the author and had high hopes for this one.  I read it over two days.  On the first day, I was convinced that it was a five star read.  However, when I was finished I was very dissatisfied.  Basically there were issues with the characters, settings, and ending.

I have to admit that the Darkly company games and its founder, Louisiana Vera were fascinating.  I loved how the board games were discussed and elements of them were revealed as the book progressed.  I loved slowly learning about Louisiana and her upbringing.  It felt like both the board games and the artist behind them could be real.  These elements were the highlight of the story and had me spellbound.

The problematic elements had overtaken the excitement by the end.  I didn't mind the main character, Dia.  However there was a lust-triangle that I seriously found distracting.  Also there were seven teens (4 boys, 3 girls) involved in the contest.  I honestly forget about one of the boys by the end and don't even remember his name.  The two other girls continued to be confused by me.  I am not sure if that was due to the narrator's accents for them or how they were written.  I feel like there should have been four teens total so that they could have been fleshed out better.

The setting also bothered me.  The teens get taken to an island where the factory is but for seemingly no real reason given that the majority of the action took place on the mainland.  Also some of the plot took place in the Valkyrie game.  Both the game and the "internship" really seemed to be nonsensical most of the time.  The more I thought about the realities of the setting and the situation, I more I was bothered.  Especially once the "twist" about Louisiana's family is shared.

But it was the ending that drove me bonkers.  Dia goes home and extremely conveniently finds a secret about her own family.  This twist annoyed me but it is what Dia decides to in the last pages that made NO sense given her personal growth during the course of the novel.  I understand that the author was going for symmetry.  I just hated it.

I know that my opinion seems so negative but I promise that I had so much enjoyment listening to the novel.  I don't regret the read and will be reading whatever the author writes next.  I just wish that the book held up upon reflection and that it lived up to the prior novel I read by her.  Arrrr!

From the First Mate:

Marisha Pessl’s greatest strength as a writer is her incredible skill as a stylist.  She’s capable of weaving intricately beautiful prose that hints and promises untold depths lurking beneath the mere surface of the plot.  The line-by-line quality of her writing enamored me when I first encountered it, and it is that same quality that makes her work an “instant buy” whenever she has a new work coming out (regardless of how far into the future that may be). So, of course, Darkly was a pre-order from the moment I saw it available.

Unfortunately, Darkly is thus far my least favorite of Pessl’s books.  That’s not to say it’s bad.  Like all of her other books, I very much enjoyed the experience of reading it.  Her prose is still as electric, intricate, and beautiful as ever.  The work had me enthralled for the better part of an afternoon.  And yet, I’m more likely to reread any of her other three books before rereading this one.

Part of the reason I didn’t enjoy Darkly as much as its predecessors is the central creative MacGuffin. Board games simply have never really appealed to me. And while Pessl does a fantastic job of creating mystery and intrigue around the Darkly games, they came across to me like mere shadows of Cardova’s Night Films from Night Film.  Is that simply because I enjoy film in a way that I’ve never enjoyed board games?  Perhaps.  But it was in thinking about the similarities between the Darklies and the Night Films that made it clear to me how much of Darkly is a remix of Pessl’s previous books.

Dia is a less adult Blue.  Louisiana, a melding of Hannah Schneider and Stanislas Cordova.  The Darkly factory a more sprawling version of the Peak.  The interns seem a curious mashup of the friend groups from both Special Topics and Neverworld Wake, especially in how all three groups acted towards our main characters.  And, of course, the elements of suicide, mazes and puzzles, broken families, coincidence, and the impermanence of found families, which appear in all four books.

There’s nothing wrong with a writer reusing themes, elements, or ideas from work to work.  Sometimes that very repetition elevates the overall corpus.  Every Faulkner novel is, to some degree, examining the same tensions, for example.  For me, the problem in Darkly was that it kept reminding me of her other books, which I enjoyed more.

The other major issue with Darkly was that it felt incomplete. I don’t know if that was because it was firmly placed in the YA category or if there was some other reason, but it felt like there were sections that set up storylines and characters that never amounted to anything.  For instance, we get seven interns, but three say and do so little that they might as well not have been there.  The factory is set up as a fascinating location, and then so little is done there. The ending feels rushed, with more than one dangling thread being explained away, such as “the lawyers said you can’t see that” when Dia asks about several things.  Neverworld Wake proved that Pessl could tie up her complex stories in a short, satisfying package (compared to Special Topics and Night Film, which were over five hundred pages).  So, it wasn’t necessarily length that made this one feel incomplete.

Darkly is proving to be one of those frustrating works that I enjoyed while reading, yet I enjoy it less the more I think about it. I can still think about the beautiful writing and some of the individual parts, and I can recall the joy of reading it.  But then I think of the whole, and I can’t say it worked for me. It hasn’t done anything to change Pessl’s “instant buy” status for me, but it will probably be quite some time before I reread it.