I was planning on reading The Dark Light in a couple of months as part of a ‘reading the ten lowest books on my TBR’ challenge, but alas, I pulled it out of the jar and had no choice but to read it in September.

The Dark Light is a dual perspective story following Alex and Rebekah. Alex is a rebellious girl who is in trouble with the police after setting fire to the home of a girl who had been bullying her. Alex’s foster parents agree that she needs to be rehabilitated, so they send her to a religious community on an island, where Alex meets Rebekah, who has lived on the island for her entire life. Rebekah soon finds herself developing feelings for Alex, and she begins to wonder if there’s more to life than the little community she is a part of.

When the leader of the group starts claiming that the rapture is coming soon both girls become desperate to escape and to live their lives to the fullest before moving on to Heaven, but things don’t go smoothly.


I was apprehensive about reading The Dark Light after reading Julia Bell’s other novel, Massive. I ranted about it at length and pretty much decided I’d never read another one of her books, completely forgetting that I had The Dark Light on my NetGalley already. Oops.

Somehow, this book is even worse than Bell’s debut.

The main problem with it is its length. Coming in at under 300 pages, it’s impossible to emotionally connect to the characters because they are severely underdeveloped. If the story had only been told from one of their viewpoints it may have been more impactful, but the dual narrative was wholly unnecessary.

All of the events are rushed, even from the first page. Alex committing arson takes place in the space of a couple of paragraphs, and what could have been a really powerful opening is instead totally confusing (and not in an intriguing, unputdownable kind of way…). The same thing happens at the end of the novel: all of the dramatic, cataclysmic events happen in one or two chapters, and it leaves you feeling completely unsatisfied.

On top of the rushing, the character development is unrealistic. Rebekah has lived her entire life surrounded by this community, believing that the rapture is real and its coming will be the best day of her life, so for her to abandon all of her beliefs for a girl she has literally just met makes no sense.

The relationship between Rebekah and Alex is also very frustrating: they develop feelings for each other as soon as they meet, despite the fact that they’ve hardly spoken, and their feelings cause them both to morph into entirely different people which couldn’t happen that quickly. The events of The Dark Light only seemed to take a week at most, but opening your mind to religious ideas when you’ve always been an atheist – or turning your back on the beliefs that you’ve had ingrained in you since the day you were born – just would not happen that fast.

Don’t even get me started on the ending. Man, it had me raging. If I’d been reading a physical copy of the book I would have thrown it across the room, no question. I’d definitely recommend skipping this one.