Rainbow in the Dark

Starred review from August 2, 2021
McGinty (The End of Fun) plays with storytelling and the subconscious as gender- and ethnically-unspecified Rainbow struggles to reconcile memories of contemporary teenage life with their current existence in the Wilds, a video game–esque world featuring RPG-like classes and ranks, machine forests, and glowing fuzzies. Blue call boxes generate slips of paper that assign quests or memories; in Rainbow’s memories, they are a kid living in a desolate seaside locale with their brother, CJ, older by 18 months, and their single mother. Memories featuring “The Eternal God/dess of Teen Depression,” a suicidal immortal who keeps failing to kill themselves, whom Rainbow imagines and wrote about for an assignment, intersperse recollections of an argument with CJ, and a subsequent search for him on a foggy cliff. Rainbow also meets Chad01, an ornery warrior, as well as fast-talking mystic Lark and her twin brother Owlsy, a rational scholar, all of whom are Lost Kids, attempting seemingly nonsensical and never-ending quests to open a portal to homes they no longer remember. Relayed chiefly through an enthralling second-person perspective, this dark yet hopeful tale, ideal for fans of A.S. King or the Shustermans’ Challenger Deep, balances humor, existentialism, and Rainbow’s mental health with great aplomb. Ages 12–up.