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| In Darkness book jacket |
1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lake, Nick. 2012. In Darkness. New York:
Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1599907437
2. PLOT SUMMARY
Shorty
is a 15 year old Haitian boy who has witnessed the brutal murder of his father
and the capture of his twin sister. Now, trapped in a collapsed hospital
with a bullet in his arm drinking blood to survive he remembers how he came to
be injured and he begins to hallucinate. Through the
hallucinations of Toussaint L'ouverture and his battle against
Napoleon to free the slaves of Haiti, Shorty finds his strength and an
unexpected connection to a man long dead.
3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Jumping
back and forth in time, In Darkness is a haunting analysis of life and
tragedy in Haiti. Although the novel is fiction, certain circumstances
presented within the pages have the authenticity of real tragedy occurring
within a country controlled by gangs. The struggle to survive is clearly
defined within the work. The title is fitting in many ways. Shorty struggles to
survive in a collapsed hospital surrounded by darkness. But more than
physical darkness is the bleak dark of oppression and tragedy which permeates
the pages of Lake's novel. Shorty clearly establishes the bleakness of his
situation when he says in darkness I count my blessings and the only blessing
he can count is that he is alive.
Shorty's
hallucinations show the reader as much about the state of his physical
existence as it does his emotional state. The desire to help free the
Haitian slaves from the French is as much about his desire to be free from the
oppression of the future as it is about the history of a nation.
Woven
into the novel are comments about guns and the desire to kill. The want
to end a life combined with the knowledge that to do so would be morally wrong
battles within Shorty. And yet, sometimes the only way to survive is to
keep others at bay or join forces with those who are in power.
Further,
Lake presents the idea of power joined with responsibility. L'ouverture
faces the dilemma of freeing the slaves only to have to control the situation
which follows and of the possibility of going from one oppressor to
another.
In
Darkness offers a glimmer of hope without providing any answers or
resolutions to the problem of life in Haiti. It is a dark and engulfing
story of pain and danger combined with a level of enticement which does not
often find its way into young adult literature.
4. AWARDS and INFORMATION
·
Michael Printz Award
·
ALA Best Fiction for Young Readers
·
Carnegie Medal in Literature Nominee
