All the Things We Do in the Dark

Overview

Ava carries a scar across her face and a silence she guards more carefully than the wound itself. Whatever happened to her has been folded away, sealed beneath a life she has rebuilt to look ordinary from the outside. Saundra Mitchell's novel opens with that fragile equilibrium already in place, a girl who has learned to survive by not looking backward.

That balance breaks when Ava stumbles across something left behind in the frozen woods at the edge of town: evidence of a secret that isn't hers, belonging to someone whose suffering was hidden as thoroughly as her own. The discovery forces a choice that drives the rest of the book — walk away and let the past stay buried, or dig into a truth that will almost certainly tear open wounds Ava has spent years trying to close.

Told with the tension of a thriller but the emotional interiority of a survivor's story, the novel follows Ava as her own reckoning becomes entangled with someone else's.

A Story About What Silence Costs

Mitchell's novel sits at the intersection of psychological thriller and survivor narrative, using the conventions of mystery — a body of evidence, a town with something to hide, a protagonist pulled toward answers she'd rather not have — to examine how trauma gets managed rather than resolved. Ava's scar is a visible mark of an experience the book treats as fundamentally unspeakable, and the frozen discovery in the woods becomes a mirror: another girl's hidden pain, surfacing at the exact moment Ava has convinced herself hers is finally settled.

The book has been read as part of a wave of young adult fiction, following works like Sadie and Girl in Pieces, that refuses to soften the aftermath of violence for younger readers, instead sitting with its psychological residue. Mitchell, an established author and anthology editor within YA fiction, uses the genre's darker register to ask what it means to inherit someone else's secret — and whether uncovering the truth heals or simply multiplies the damage.

Why All the Things We Do in the Dark Has Been Challenged

Objections to the novel center on its unflinching treatment of sexual assault and its psychological and physical aftermath, including the protagonist's scarring and the depiction of another character's hidden victimization. Challengers have also pointed to the book's broader treatment of violence and trauma, arguing that its content is too graphic or emotionally intense for the school library shelves and classrooms where it circulates. Some objections frame the book within wider concerns about sexually explicit or traumatic material available to teenage readers, rather than isolating specific scenes.

Defenders counter that the novel's darkness serves its subject rather than sensationalizing it, giving voice to experiences that many teen readers recognize from their own lives or the lives of people around them. The book has been the subject of 9 state-level and 22 district-level challenges tracked in this catalog, reflecting how contested its handling of assault and trauma has proven in schools nationwide.