Mystery Book Review - The Light We Lost by Kyla Stone

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆

Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆

Overall: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"When all lights fail, will you survive? A catastrophic solar flare strikes Earth, plunging half the planet into darkness. Amid the chaos, thirteen-year-old Shiloh awakens to a nightmare: a dead body beside her, her brother missing, and no recollection of what happened.

As she desperately searches for her brother, a killer is hot on her trail, determined to silence the only witness to the brutal crime.

Undersheriff Jackson Cross races against time to catch the killer and save an innocent girl. But the more he uncovers, the deeper he is drawn into a dangerous darkness that threatens to consume him.

With law and order crumbling around him, Jackson's only hope may lie with Eli Pope, a ruthless ex-convict just released from prison. But Eli has a score to settle - he's hellbent on vengeance against the very sheriff who put him behind bars.

With the world on the brink of destruction, the stakes have never been higher. As the killer closes in on Shiloh and her missing brother, they must navigate the devastation to stay alive."

My current streak of reviews notwithstanding, I swear I don't hate every book that I read. 

On paper, this was my type of read, but in practice it was just. so. slow. I mean, it's a dystopian thriller, the description literally starts off with a catastrophic solar flair plunging half the world into darkness...terrifying, exciting, stressful! If that was how the book started, I would have been so in. 

Instead, we get about 250 pages of weird aurora borealis and hints that the issues they're causing with cell phones and other technology may be worse than people seem to be anticipating. A truly excessive amount of time was spent on Jackson and Lena (unmentioned in the synopsis, despite being a pretty big part of the story) disaster prepping and Lena painstakingly driving across several states to get to the Upper Peninsula. Oh, and Lena checking her blood sugar and drinking apple juice. Because, lest you forget, she's a Type 1 diabetic. So much of at least the first two-thirds of this could have been trimmed to make room for actually developing the plot.

Instead, we get pretty much no hint at what is actually going on until things finally kick off toward the end of the book, and then we're supposed to be like 😱 holy shit! Don't get me wrong, it was exciting, but it would have been so much more impactful if the actual storyline had been developed, instead of hitting the borealis so hard, over and over, and then shoehorning everything else in. I also frankly thought Eli's entire storyline was underwhelming and somewhat bullshit. From the jump it didn't make sense to me, and I thought maybe as more details were revealed all would become clear, but instead it just felt more and more like a poorly thought out, forced, and unearned plot point. Justice for Eli Pope, not just for being wrongfully imprisoned but also for that piss-poor story development.

In general, I also thought the character development across the board was lazy and cliched. Eli is the dark, brooding bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Jackson is the town's shining example, lawful good to his core and unable to see nuance, Lena is the One Who Got Away, Shiloh is the troubled tomboy child...meh meh meh meh meh. This was a great idea but was executed in an aggressively mediocre way.