Review: This Darkness Mine by Mindy McGinnis

This Darkness Mine by Mindy McGinnis -- HarperCollins Canada -- October 2017

I received an advance reading copy of this book from HarperCollins Canada in exchange for an honest review. This does not influence my opinion of the book whatsoever.

I have a very physical reaction to Mindy McGinnis' writing. Immediately after I read her last book, The Female of the Species, I had to leave the house and take a very long walk. I needed air, happy thoughts and probably a nice warm shower. McGinnis has a way of creating extreme close-ups of the human body but also intimate studies of the human psyche. She puts her characters through both subtle and extreme forms of physical gore. Where The Female of the Species conjured the kind of anger in me that made me want to scream at society, This Darkness Mine left me reeling for entirely different reasons.

In This Darkness Mine, Sasha Stone is the epitome of the ideal student and daughter. She reminds me of Nina in Black Swan: a "good girl" on a destructive pursuit of perfection. She has perfect grades, is incredibly gifted at playing the clarinet, has the perfect boyfriend and is well on her way to becoming valedictorian. She never steps outside the lines of her perfectly constructed world where she has calculated and even manipulated life to go her way. Everything is going according to her master plan until she discovers she had a twin sister she never knew about. Because she absorbed her in the womb.

Yes, you read that correctly.

This Darkness Mine is refreshing not only because it is a major contrast to the themes typically explored in YA, but also because its protagonist is very, very unlikeable and unreliable. I felt like the source of my fear while reading this book kept switching from person to person. I never knew who to like and to trust, which kept the reading experience very suspenseful. I felt like I was lead to feel that way about Sasha in particular, who grew more and more distant from me as a reader. I appreciate how McGinnis unapologetically presents a female character who is incredibly flawed and not at all a standard to live up to. At times I wanted for Sasha to find some sense of normalcy, which in turn made me feel guilty because I was sympathizing with a character I was supposed to dislike. Because of this, I find McGinnis really, really good at toying with readers' emotions and leading them to draw unsuspecting and surprising conclusions. She exposes the darkness inside us all, even the ones who are supposedly good.

With that said, I wish McGinnis had made a clearer distinction regarding Sasha's mental health. Spoiler alert: It never becomes clear whether or not Sasha has a mental illness, though it is lightly suggested by some of the other characters, and I think that clarification is necessary. Maybe this was left open ended for the reader to decide, but even then I think there's too much room for potential harm. If McGinnis intended to depict a character with a mental illness, then this book could be a potentially damaging representation. But to be fair, I read from an ARC, so this may have been better clarified in the final version of the book.

I think it is very appropriate that I don't know whether to like or dislike this read. I don't think it's as simple as liking it 100 per cent. Like Sasha, who tries to find a distinction between two selves, I found myself torn between deciding who gets to be good and who is evil.