A review by kiiitasticbooks
A Shot in the Dark by Victoria Lee

5.0

 

It didn’t take long for me to be obsessed with this book.

I love a book with good banter between the main characters, but I also love a book that has funny lines. So when our main characters meet each other and almost immediately fall into a conversation where the love interest describes himself as “a connoisseur of beaver butt juice”? I could not put this book down and ended up finishing the whole thing in one day!

A Shot In The Dark follows Ely, a girl whose photography idol is teaching a class across the country. She moves to New York solely to attend the class, but goes out to a club the night before and ends up spending the night at a hotel with a hot stranger.

To no reader’s surprise, she goes to class the next morning to find that her one night stand is her new teacher/photography idol, Wyatt Cole.

Most of this book focuses on the two’s relationship amidst their worries about how their pasts with drug addiction will affect their futures. Both Ely and Wyatt actively struggle with addiction throughout the book, and this affects the way these characters interact with both each other and the world.

But this book also has a large focus on righting past wrongs and reconnecting with the people and communities Ely and Wyatt broke away from in their pasts. Ely spends a majority of this book lurking on the outskirts of religion, attending events as an outsider and questioning whether or not she wants to take the plunge and reenter a world she was forced out of as a teen. Meanwhile, Wyatt ran from an abusive father to stay true to himself, but that decision meant running from the other members of his family as well.

The plot and the writing style do a very good job at balancing each other out. This book is neither entirely humorous nor sad, but a good mix between the two. Having characters I could easily love made it easy to care for their stories and see the way this book went, and I was really surprised to find myself finishing this whole book within a single day.

I definitely highly recommend this book, and I’m 100% picking up a physical copy for my own bookshelf once A Shot In The Dark is published!