"Gone Dark," by Amanda Panitch

“In a large-scale catastrophe where the entirety of the United States loses power for a year, ninety percent of the population will die. Ninety. Percent. That’s about two-hundred-and-ninety million people.” This is a quote from the book Gone Dark by Amanda Panitch. This line perfectly sets the mood for the rest of the book, while also giving the reader an idea of how our main character, Zara, thinks most of the time, or at least during the power outage. Gone Dark is about a nearly nation-wide power outage in the United States. It is told from the perspective of a teenage girl named Zara, and follows her and her friends as they struggle to survive this disaster. Zara spent most of her pre-teenage years on a compound in the middle of the woods with her mother and father. They lived without electricity and contact with the outside world. One day, unbeknownst to Zara, her mom decides to take her to California and leave her dad all by himself. Years later, she must find her way back to her dad’s compound with her friends to seek shelter until this whole power outage ends. However, they have to be careful, because there are some very unfriendly men hunting down Zara, and if they find her, she has no idea what they’ll do with her, and her friends. According to “amandaelliotbooks.com”, “Amanda Elliot lives with her family in New Jersey, where she experiments with homemade ice cream flavors, tries her best to grow vegetables in her tiny garden, and writes mysteries under the name Bellamy Rose.” She lives in New York City and writes dark and funny stories for teenagers. Panitch is also the author of thriller books Never Missing, Never, Found and Damage Done. 

In the book, one night when Zara is playing her favorite videogame with her friend, Gabe, the power suddenly goes out. She’s forced to go to sleep by her mother, and the next morning, the power is back. However, in her computer science class later that day, the power goes out again. Now, Zara starts to worry; she tells herself that she’s just being crazy, but after some research about other power outages throughout the country, she becomes very afraid. The next day, while walking back home from a sleepover at her best friend Estella(who’s also Gabe’s sister)’s house, she encounters a man with vine tattoos. After a moment of talking, Zara realizes that something is up, but when she tries to walk away two more men show up and she has to run around and across neighborhoods to escape them. Another day passes, and she doesn’t want to go home since they might follow her, so she instead tries to find her mom. She walks all the way to the rose bowl and when she finds her mom there, she also finds Gabe. Gabe’s family was kidnapped and only he escaped, so he and Zara leave to go find them. When Zara passes out from exhaustion, they are saved by a Mormon church, and meet a boy named Ronan. When the Mormon camp is broken into, the three of them escape and walk across states to a place Zara calls “PartyTown”, because they have electricity, food, and there’s a bunch of people there. While Zara is exploring, she finds Estella there, and also meets two other girls, Ina and Jasmine. After finding out something disturbing about the men in charge of PartyTown, they all leave. Since none of them really have anywhere to go, Zara offers to take them all back to her father’s compound, and stay there until they can figure something else out; but they run into the men who have been chasing Zara the whole time. Zara thinks they’re trying to kill her, but one of them tells her something about her dad that makes her a little nervous to meet with him again. In this book, there are two main conflicts, the one between Zara and the man with the vine tattoo, and the internal conflict between Zara and her father’s voice. Over the course of the book, the conflict between Zara and the tattoo man doesn’t change much besides the fact that Zara becomes less and less averse to hurting him, and is less afraid of him. When she first meets him, all she does is run away, but later in the book she is willing to shoot him in the leg and threatens him too. The conflict in Zara’s mind with her father’s voice changes throughout the book as the voice first becoming more intense, but then slowly fading away as the story progresses and Zara becomes more comfortable with accepting help from her friends and making mistakes, as opposed to her dad always telling her that Zara needs to fend for herself and she’s the only person she can really trust. The outcome of Zara’s conflict with the man with vine tattoos is a bit of a spoiler, but lets just say, they never really resolve their issues. The last time they talk though, he says something about Zara’s dad that makes her question whether her father is a good person or not. By the end of the book, Zara also manages to get rid of her dad’s voice in her head, and accept that he was wrong about most of the things he told her. At the beginning of this book, Estella is characterized by other people as kind, genuine, and a little silly. She is also very smart, and friendly. Unfortunately, due to the death of her parents, separation from her brother, and the power outage as a whole, she becomes painfully heartbroken and lifeless. She tries to act like she once would when she’s travelling with Zara, Gabe, and all their friends, but it doesn’t quite work to cheer anyone up for long. For a while it seemed like there was no way to get her spark back, but by the end of the book, she’s accepting of what happened and starts to feel better.

Something I liked about this book was how the author was able to write Zara as the “leader” of her group without making the rest of her friends seem incapable. Most of the time, protagonists in stories get written as these super cool, smart, perfect, better-than-everyone characters. However, in Gone Dark, all of Zara’s friends have strengths, and are able to contribute to the group. Another thing I liked was how short this book’s chapters were. It’s not very important to a lot of people, but it made the book way easier for me to read and pace myself within the time frame I had to read it. In my opinion, this book is worth the buy. If you like thriller books with lots of twists and different settings, you would enjoy this book. Gone Dark is a particularly scary book, because it demonstrates the fact that people in modern society today would be doomed in a large-scale catastrophe like the one in the book. It makes you rethink how much control we actually have over our safety and our lives.