Apologies in advance, this review is likely to be slightly confusing to read as I obviously don’t want to spoil anything that happens!

Title: The Taste of Blue Light
Series: N/a
Author: Lydia Ruffles
Publisher: Hachette Children’s Group/Hodder Children’s Books
Release Date: 6th March 2018
Pages: 352
Source: eARC provided through NetGalley by Hachette Children’s Group/Hodder Children’s Books (this in no way affects my review which is honest and unbiased)
Rating:

Goodreads Synopsis:

‘‘Beautiful. Visceral. Gripping. I LOVED IT’ LOUISE O’NEILL

An incandescent, soul-searching story about a broken young woman’s search for a truth buried so deep it threatens to consume her, body and mind.

These are the things Lux knows:
She is an artist.
She is lucky.
She is broken.

These are the things she doesn’t know:
What happened over the summer.
Why she ended up in hospital.
Why her memories are etched in red.

Desperate to uncover the truth, Lux’s time is running out. If she cannot piece together the events of the summer and regain control of her fractured mind, she will be taken away from everything and everyone she holds dear.

If her dreams don’t swallow her first.

‘It’s very brave, and fierce, and electric’ SARA BARNARD’‘

Review

Content/trigger warnings: self harm, violence.

In The Taste of Blue Light, we follow the main character Lux on her journey to remember what had placed her in hospital over summer. From the first chapter, we’re introduced to Lux as a party goer who loves to take recreational drugs. She has two best friends – Olivia and Mei – and to me she came across as a pretty unlikeable character for a lot of the book due to her actions. Lux attends a boarding school with her friends that specialises in encouraging students to become artists, which I found interesting and personally I’d have loved to have gone to a school like that (but without all the scandals).

We get a little case of insta-love too with a new student from America called Cal, it didn’t make sense at the beginning but grows to be quite a cute coupling. My absolute favourite characters were Mei and Olivia though, it’s clear that they love Lux and want to do as much as they can to help her on her journey. Lux’s parents play an important role also, trying their absolute hardest to help their daughter and you can’t help but feel bad about how Lux reacts to them throughout.

When it’s finally revealed why she can’t remember what happened, it was not at all what I had expected and around that point I found myself in tears because the story sucks you in and I love the way that it’s written and how Lux reacts. After the revelation though, we skip a couple of years to find out how Lux is dealing with things. Although I understand why this is important for the reader to see, personally I would have preferred if the book had ended just before. I found that one of her actions following made me dislike her a little again but then if that had been left out I think it would have been a much more perfect ending – it just didn’t make sense to me reading it.

I really did enjoy some parts of this book but others made me lose interest far too quickly and some parts I just really disliked the elements of. I’d give it a 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 stars purely because of the brilliantly emotional way that her realisation is revealed.