Description:
The town of Glory is famous for two things: businesses that front for seedy, if not illegal, enterprises and the suicides that happen along the Indigo River. Marsden is desperate to escape the “bed-and-breakfast” where her mother works as a prostitute—and where her own fate has been decided—and she wants to give her little sister a better life. But escape means money, which leads Mars to skim the bodies that show up along the Indigo River. It’s there that she runs into Jude, who has secrets of his own and whose brother’s suicide may be linked to Mars’s own sordid family history. As they grow closer, the two unearth secrets that could allow them to move forward . . . or chain them to the Indigo forever.
Marité's Review:
Along the Indigo is not a thrilling read, nor is it heart-pounding, rather its a novel that slowly builds like the heat of a lazy summer day until you are wrapped in it, and, once it is finished, you are left with the impression of satisfaction and the warmth that comes of knowing you just read a really great book. Like the ginger that the people of Glory just came to associate with the covert, Mars harsh reality filled with prostitution and suicide became something she associated with normalcy, and by creating this type of reality the sensitive subject matter of suicide and prostitution was not romanticized. Instead, it was presented to the reader as just another cold, harsh reality of life in a place where there is not much of one to be found. Emphasizing the limited options there are of ever leaving a place like Glory and the desperation that would lead anyone to do loathsome acts. Making anybody wonder, how far would one go to get out of a place like Glory? Or the real question, how much of our sins can be forgiven?
The budding romance between Mars and Jude served as the real attention-getter of this book for me as most of this book was built around the drama of Jude uncovering Mars secret. Also, for anyone who is of color, such as myself, it was nice to see a romance between a biracial couple. The only other book that I have read having done so was The Astonishing Color of After by X.R. Pan. But, unlike X.R. Pan's protagonist, Mars was not so uncomfortable about being biracial than she was by being easily recognized as the descendant of a mad man. To make this book even more relatable to me and more unlike others, Mars did not wish to embrace one side of her more than the other which most biracial characters are shown to struggle with, but instead her only wish was to shake the labels forced upon her by the town of Glory and the legacies of her ancestors so that she could become her own person. Even if one of those legacies may have included being able to more or less talk to the dead, which I mean, come on, is kind of cool.
Verdict: ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕ ☕
About the Author:
Elsie Chapman grew up in Prince George, British Columbia, before graduating from the University of British Columbia with a bachelor of arts in English literature. She currently lives in Tokyo with her husband and children. She is the author of the young adult thrillers Dualed and Divided.
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