Review: 'A Fix of Light' by Kel Menton
Between shadow and daybreak
A Fix of Light, when reduced to its four-word title, carries the suggestion of serenity. But it’s precisely the tale’s complete subversion of this quietude that haunts: a depiction of darkness, both physical and cerebral.
Though marketed for a younger audience, the story resonates most where battles with self-doubt and isolation emerge—struggles we later recognize as universal, even if adulthood dulls their sharpest edges. In truth, A Fix of Light is a tale of wide, though demanding, appeal.
Its challenge lies in confronting the absurdities of suffering, inflicted on both body and psyche. This is a dark narrative, as heavy and urgent as any plea for empathy echoing across headlines.
Shadows seep between the lines and gnaw at their margins, starved for quiet devastation, much like the terrors swarming the protagonist’s mind and the love interest’s childhood memories.
Here, horror and romance merge into something new: a fantasy woven with ominous, biting Gaelic folklore, where transition and transformation touch every shape—real or once thought unimaginable.
Nothing in A Fix of Light is diluted for palatability: not the language, which shivers with poetic intensity, nor the lives it holds, harrowed by torments many face even without the grief of nightmares made flesh.
This is a story for the modern teenager, sceptical of moral lessons passed down by those blind to the turmoil within, and for any adult willing to let the world.
The narrative offers no easy answers or false comforts, but instead invites us to sit with the complexities of the human spirit: the contradictions, the suffering, and the quiet triumphs.
The story offers an exploration of the tensions between shadow and illumination, where even in the deepest, most labyrinthine despair, a flicker of becoming awaits. In this way, A Fix of Light asks us not only to witness but to feel, to see beyond the surface, and to embrace the weight and wonder of the world as it truly is.
An advance copy was provided by Little Island Books.
Path of Engagement
♜♛♝♜♛
Genres
LGBTQ+ | Teens & YA
Publication Date
May 6, 2025