My immediate thoughts after reading Lili Anolik's Dark Rooms: 
 1. Wait, that's it? 
 2. Seriously, that's freaking IT?!! 
 3. That's bullshit. 
 4. Well, I guess that's one weekend I can never get back. 
 I should have known. I was on a roll; I was reading some good, some not so good but entertaining books and then I read Dark Rooms and my streak came to a screeching halt. I knew within reading the first paragraph I wasn't going to like it but I kept trudging away. My instincts were right. 
 Dark Rooms is a murder mystery set in a prep school. At least, that's what the book jacket tells me. In actuality, it's a meandering, lukewarm, and ridiculous melodrama that happens to have a murder in it. 
 The victim? Nica, a popular but emotionally withholding girl who is found shot in a graveyard one night. The suspect is her ex boyfriend, Jamie, but he has an alibi. Nica's parents and older sister but immature sister, Grace, are devastated. The case is seemingly closed when another classmate commits suicide and leaves in his note that he killed Nica. 
 Case closed, right? Not quite. Grace becomes obsessed with finding Nica's killer while dealing with her own emotional spiral into oblivion. During the process, she discovers hidden aspects of Nica's past as well as her parents' that connect with her present. 
 I didn't enjoy Anolik's writing. There was something about that annoyed me. It felt a bit like reading bad fan fiction. I think a lot of it was due her writing from Grace's POV. Grace was a horrible character. She was annoying, immature, ridiculously naive and stupid. She was the "Too Stupid to Live" heroine. 
 Many of the plot points just fell on her lap conveniently. SPOILER ALERT: Grace is raped at a party where she was high and as a result is pregnant. For some reason, the idea of being raped never occurs to her until her rapist confronts her. Mind you, this guy is also her love interest AND Nica's ex-boyfriend. Yup. Then, he leaves her voice mail asking Grace to marry him and have his baby. 
 Well, isn't that special? 
 No. It's not. What it is is very stupid, unfathomable, and offensive. Ugh. 
 I get it. The guy was consumed by grief; at the time, Grace, all strung out, was dressed like Nica. So when she was passed out but mumbling sweet nothings, dude pounced. Get the F out of here, Anolik, with your bullshit excuse. 
 Also, all that crap to find the killer and Grace does and nothing is done about it. According to her, nothing could be done about it. Really? You sure? I bet it can if you tried, idiot. 
 There were only 2 aspects about Dark Rooms I liked: First, I liked what Anolik said ultimately about Grace solving the crime: it solved nothing. It made Grace stagnant when she should have been moving on with her life. If I had liked any of the characters, I would have appreciated this more. 
 The second was that, despite being horrible, Dark Rooms is an insanely fast read. That was its saving Grace. Ha! Made a pun.