AUTHOR: Patrick Ness
PUBLISHED: September 19th, 2017
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Contemporary
PREMISE: A boy tries figuring out life while dealing with his super religious family, an ex-boyfriend who he's trying to get over, a new boy and everything in between.
MY REVIEW: Patrick Ness is one of those authors who is always writing interesting things. I never quite know what I'll be getting with him, but I do know that it will likely be awesome. Release is no exception with this pattern. But this is the one time that I honestly...just didn't get what he was doing.
Let me explain, there are two stories in this book. The first story is the summary I described. That story is fantastic, I love it and if I could rate the book based just on Adam's story alone, this would be a pretty high rating and be one of my top contemporary books of the year. But....it's not the only part. See, there's this other story going on dealing with ghosts and magic and...look I'm all for that stuff, you guys know that but...there wasn't really a point to it? At least none that I saw. Perhaps there was and I missed it? I don't know. It turns out this is inspired by Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf which I have never read. So maybe it ties into that somehow?
I don't know guys, I can't offer any explanation for the fantasy part because it just plain doesn't make sense to me. But I will say that Adam's story is fantastic and if you read this book, read it for that. But this is again what I appreciate about Ness: he experiments with ways of writing. Sometimes it doesn't always make sense to me, but I appreciate that he tries different things.
WHO SHOULD READ: Mrs. Dalloway fans, contemporary fiction fans, Patrick Ness fans
MY RATING: Four out of Five writing experiments I didn't totally get
No comments:
Post a Comment