Review: Indigo by Krista Wagner

Published: December 2016

Synopsis: “Some secrets can be dangerous. If Indigo doesn't find a way to escape hers, she just might end up dead. When emotionally driven Indigo falls in love with flirtatious Brian, she finds herself afflicted by cruel peers and encumbered with a secret that has her questioning her worth. Indigo is quickly becoming numb to the world. Will she find the desire to live before it's too late?”

Rating: ***

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I received a free copy of Indigo from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Indigo follows the high school life of a female protagonist also called Indigo. We are introduced to her just after her first boyfriend had dumped her and she is going through the usual emotions associated with this. This immediately makes Indigo stand out as a YA novel, as this is a situation to which all teens and older readers can relate to. It also provides opportunity and scope for character development, as you would like to think that by the end of the book all the teen characters would have developed in one way or another.

The "sex is sacred within marriage" theme came out of nowhere after about 40 pages and it was about the same time we discovered the characters were seniors, which I believe is about 17/18 years old (I'm English so apologies if this is incorrect). I did struggle to align the dialogue and opinions with those of 18-year olds, but this may be because I am in such a different demographic to the characters (late 20-year-old female). I didn't like Indigo as a character, considering she held the above beliefs about sex, she moved from one boy to another to another very quickly and it seemed she felt each one was the most amazing boy ever. This came across as a little immature and gave me the impression that Indigo was a very changeable, possibly easily led character. One quote really stuck out for me, which was almost the last straw in my tolerance of Indigo "So I love God but not as much as I love boys". Yes, I am sure most teens who are raised in religious families and environments feel like this as some point, but the way this was described in Indigo didn't seem to do the experience justice. It was just glossed over and trivialized. On reading the afterword, I realised that “sexual sin” was an extremely personal topic for the author and she wanted to write this book as a way of helping others who were also experiencing this.

Brian's reaction to other people finding out about his and Indigo's sexual relationship was completely vile and chauvinistic, he took absolutely no blame and heaped it all on her. This became even more unreasonable when you discover that they didn’t have sex once, but 10 times! The fact that someone fictional or otherwise can take no responsibility for having sex 10 times is completely beyond my comprehension, and I assume is a major contributing factor to sexual sin. All I knew is that I was getting more and more frustrated with the whole novel, but also hoped this could prove to be a turning point for Indigo and she might, just might grow up a bit.

Indigo was written in quite a stilted manner and didn't seem to flow all that well. It felt as though the dialogue and description jumped about a lot and was almost forced. The writing style didn't seem natural, it was as if the author was struggling to convey what they wanted to. Or as if the major scenes had been written but there was no bridge between them, this made the book feel very disjointed.

The more I thought about Indigo when I wasn't reading it (and spoke about it to people) I realised that it might be very cleverly written. At face value, it seems very rushed and glossed over, but it is a story that I am thinking about while not reading and talking about to people and the fact that it is able to elicit such a strong response from me, can only be a good thing. The way it is written may mean it appeals to even younger readers, giving it a much wider audience which again is a huge positive point considering the effect the author wanted it to have.