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Synopsis:

Rainbow Black is part murder mystery, part gay international-fugitive love story—set against the ’90s Satanic Panic and spanning 20 years in the life of a young woman pulled into its undertow.

Lacey Bond is a thirteen-year-old girl in New Hampshire growing up in the tranquility of her hippie parents’ rural daycare center. Then the Satanic Panic hits. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations as part of a mass hysteria sweeping the nation. When a horrific murder brings Lacey to the breaking point, she makes a ruthless choice that will haunt her for decades.

Review:

Rainbow Black is a novel that starts by kicking you in the guts, and once you are down on the ground, it does not stop kicking you until the last page. This the story of Lacey Bond, who grew up with hippie parents that ran a child’s daycare. They are arrested for the accusations of molesting the children in their care in the name of Satan. This parallels the real life case of The McMartin Preschool, where children as young as two years old were saying that the staff was doing sexual things to them in the guise of Satanic rituals. None of this is proven except through horrible psychotherapy and thoughts impressed into the minds of young children. This also is the catalyst of the real Satanic Panic, where many parents and church leaders ran a campaign against the rise of Satanism, striking out against anyone who was not exactly like them. When Lacey’s parents are arrested, her world continues to fall apart through her own experiences with case workers, psychiatric evaluations, and foster care. Knowing that she is attracted to women from a young age does not help her and is used as a weapon by people trying to find evidence of parental abuse and uses her queerness against her. There is nothing in her life that is going to turn out right, and the only person that has been close to being her friend is Dylan, a kid she knew when she was very young as a kid who wore the same NASCAR shirt every day because it might be his only one, who spent time with her family because his mother was an addict, and who eventually became the one person Lacey knew she could trust, who she could love, and who she would do anything for.

The term black rainbow represents several different things, One is that a black rainbow represents change and transformation. Lacey and Dylan transform tremendously throughout the novel, not only from being kids to being adults or by changing their names, but by changing who they are completely. Even when they start to have some success toward the end of the novel, they are very aware that this is because they had to transform themselves from the children who were let down by their parents and ended up reconnecting in the foster care system, who really did not given much hope for a successful future. This is another representation of the black rainbow: regardless of what terrible events happen in their lives, they continue to move forward, continue to hope for the best outcome. Unfortunately the world does not work that way for people, and hope is more likely to be taken from you than it is to be fulfilled.

The novel feels like it expresses the sloppiness of Lacey’s life in the same way that many things in life do not get resolved. There are many threads that do not have a real finish, and there are not many resolutions. This can be a complaint in entertainment because everyone wants a tidy little story, but the truth is that Rainbow Black never pretends to be a tidy little story. It never promises a happy ending or any satisfying conclusion at all. This is more like how life and tragedy really finishes most of the time. We like complete endings in books because the stories of our life are often left incomplete. I do understand that nothing really gets truly resolved in the novel, but this is more accurate to life than we care to admit. We are only left with the same hope that Lacey Bond has from the first page of the novel, that everything will eventually work out, even after the pages are finished.