Rain City Lights: A Gritty Coming-Of-Age

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Rain City Lights by Marissa Harisson
Genres: Coming of Age (YA), Fiction, Mystery/Thriller, Romance
Pages: 346
Goodreads

One part Coming of Age Story. One part Murder Mystery. As they navigate their way through Seattle's Underground, Monti & Sasha will break and warm your heart!

"Sometimes you make so much history with someone, the present just don't make sense."

In the summer of 1981, a serial killer preys on black, teenage prostitutes working Seattle’s arterial highways. But the eyes of youth are blind to danger, and Montgomery “Monti” Jackson is distracted by her own problems. She’ll be starting high school soon, and the return of her mother’s boyfriend heightens the tension in her fractured household.

To add to her worries, Monti fears she may be in love with her best friend Sasha. But as close as they’d once been, now they couldn’t feel further apart. Sasha is a burnout punk rocker, and has befriended the neighborhood drug dealer. And when an eviction notice is posted on Monti’s door, a strange dynamic forms between them.

One night, an altercation leaves her family penniless. So Monti turns to the very streets where a killer stalks and ensnares young women, beginning her journey towards understanding one, simple truth - sometimes your only choices in life are to love and survive.

Rain City Lights is a gritty, urban love story that explores how poverty, addiction and abuse is passed from one generation to the next.

♥♥♥

---

This book, damn. It has a lot going on, there’s a lot to process – I say that in the best way. When I went into this, I didn’t really know what to expect. The synopsis gives you an idea, obviously, but it ended up being way more and not what I expected at all.

This is a story told in multiple POVs. There’s the main two, Sasha and Monti, plus a few extra that get sprinkled in here and there. There is one specific POV that I found very interesting to follow that definitely kept the murder mystery going, but I can’t spoil that for you so I’ll just focus on the stars of the show: Sasha and Monti. The book follows them from adolescence to adulthood. They’re both flawed characters with complex backgrounds and different ways of dealing with their struggles. I enjoyed the juxtaposition between the two characters and their choices. Their friendship felt real and honest, even if it wasn’t perfect all the time. I rooted for both of them to make it through and come out on top. 

The story itself is a lot. In a good way. Harrison addresses so many issues in this book: poverty, abuse, addiction, sex work, friendship, love, family, sexism, racism, religion – it has everything. Sometimes when a book covers so many different topics it can feel bogged down, but Harrison did it in a way that just felt natural and each issue was addressed in it’s own way. For a book that has so much weight to it, I think Harrison handled it really well. My only issue was the slow beginning, but since this is a book built around it’s characters, it made sense to have that much development in the beginning.

Now, for the murder mystery part of this book. The synopsis is correct, it’s part coming of age and part murder mystery. It’s almost like two books in one, but it all connects in the end. Even though it’s just sprinkled in here and there (until the 1/3 of the book), I was invested. I wanted to know who it was (I thought I knew for a while, I was wrong), and I wanted to know how it connected to Monti & Sasha. The solution didn’t disappoint. I can’t say much without spoiling, but I will say I thought it was a good mystery that blended into the story really well. 

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It took a little for me to get into it, but once I did, I couldn’t put it down. Monti and Sasha are wonderful characters to follow – especially if you like flawed characters. I will say that this book is not for the faint of heart. There are so many topics in here that could be hard for some to read. Topics include drug use & addiction, rape, abuse, suicide, and murder. They each have varying degrees of description.