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A review by bookph1le
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
3.0
I think this book is very well-written, and since I've read The Knife of Never Letting Go, it shouldn't have surprised me that it's not exactly a light read, but the heaviness of it did surprise me. That's not a complaint about the book, it's a personal thing as I was hoping for something more light-hearted and funny about being the normal kid stuck with having to deal with the aftermath of the havoc the Specials tend to wreck.
More complete review to come.
Full review:
This book was a bizarre reading experience. Having read Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, I was frankly surprised when I first saw this book, as its description made it sound like a light-hearted romp of a book, one in which the reader gets to see what it's like to be one of the not-Special kids who have to deal with the destructive aftermath of the Specials' struggles against the big, bad evil. Some spoilers to follow.
I was really looking forward to reading that book. However, what I found contained in this book's pages is not that light-hearted story. Essentially, this is a contemporary novel with some supernatural elements woven into it, and the blend isn't always smooth. It gives the book an overall uneven feel that prevented me from really getting into it, because the whole time I was reading it I kept switching back and forth from "it's urban fantasy" to "it's a contemporary novel".
The urban fantasy elements mostly comes from the brief descriptions that kick off each chapter, in which Ness provides a summary of what the interestingly-named Special kids (the book refers to these characters as "Indie Kids", a label that doesn't make much sense to me, frankly) are up to. These were some of my favorite sections in the book, as they provide a wry bit of satire that pokes what feels to me like gentle and loving fun at some of the worst tropes of the YA/Middle Grade fantasy/sci-fi genre. Though the summaries are typically only a few sentences, they are packed with plenty of the teenage angst, love triangles, and betrayals that seem inevitable when you're reading genre YA fiction. Yet even as Ness is making fun of genre tropes, I get the impression he has a sincere appreciation for those genres, so I never found the summaries to be too acerbic. A few in particular abounded with wit, and I often laughed at them.
As for the contemporary side, I will say this: Ness can write. His prose has a stark quality to it, though I don't think it's particularly spare. Sometimes when I read books, I feel like the author is overreaching when trying to make the reader feel for the characters, ending up tipping into melodrama. Not so with Ness. He has a plain way of stating the facts of his characters' struggles and laying them out in bald words that made me really feel their pain. This book deals with some gritty stuff: anorexia, Alzheimer's Disease, and obsessive compulsive disorder, just to name a few.
The family dynamic in this book is fraught, with Mike's and Mel's mother being an ambitious politician who tends to use her family to full effect, while their father is an alcoholic who can't deal with his wife's ambition. Their little sister, Meredith, is a prodigy, something their mother encourages with a lot of vigor. At first Meredith felt like a caricature, but then the book does something I was so happy to see a YA book doing: it fleshed her out and portrayed her as a full-fledged character, while also creating a very believable dynamic between her and her older siblings. This was another of my favorite aspects of the story, and I really enjoyed seeing how Mel, Mike, and Meredith learned to forge strong bonds with one another, clinging together even as their parents' blatant neglect of them threatens to tip each of them over the ledge. I was especially touched by later chapters, in which Meredith expresses her distress at the thought of being left behind by Mike and Mel when they go off to college the following year.
There's also a love triangle of sorts in the book: Mike is in love with his longtime friend Henna, who can't stop thinking about the new kid, Nathan. I didn't like this aspect of the book as much. Mike has a pretty unhealthy obsession with Henna, and some of his behavior is downright distasteful. I could never quite put my finger on Henna herself as some of her behavior seems kind of erratic--not as if she's going off the deep end or something, but more as if I never had a clear picture of who she was and what she stood for because those aspects of her personality seemed to keep changing. She puts up with more from Mike than I thought was realistic at times.
Mike's relationship with Jared is better, though there's a plot twist with regard to Jared I think I'd have preferred to have left out of the book entirely. Otherwise, I liked Jared and had a strong picture of him as a character. I liked how Ness explored Mike's jealousy at Jared's highly functional relationship with his father, but slowly peeled back the curtain so that Mike begins to understand that everyone has their own problems and issues, and that it's really not helpful to create an idealized view of others.
The urban fantasy aspect of the novel and the contemporary aspect of it collide on several occasions, and while I suspect Ness had a bit of a message here, that you don't have to be a person with mythic powers to experience a good deal of real life trauma and upheaval, when the worlds collide it feels too much like an interruption. Ultimately, I pretty much wished the urban fantasy elements had been chucked altogether, and that this book had been a straight-up contemporary book. I think it might have been stronger for it in the end.
Though I'm not going to lie: I kind of hope Ness writes that other book, the one about the Indie kids and their destinies.
More complete review to come.
Full review:
This book was a bizarre reading experience. Having read Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, I was frankly surprised when I first saw this book, as its description made it sound like a light-hearted romp of a book, one in which the reader gets to see what it's like to be one of the not-Special kids who have to deal with the destructive aftermath of the Specials' struggles against the big, bad evil. Some spoilers to follow.
I was really looking forward to reading that book. However, what I found contained in this book's pages is not that light-hearted story. Essentially, this is a contemporary novel with some supernatural elements woven into it, and the blend isn't always smooth. It gives the book an overall uneven feel that prevented me from really getting into it, because the whole time I was reading it I kept switching back and forth from "it's urban fantasy" to "it's a contemporary novel".
The urban fantasy elements mostly comes from the brief descriptions that kick off each chapter, in which Ness provides a summary of what the interestingly-named Special kids (the book refers to these characters as "Indie Kids", a label that doesn't make much sense to me, frankly) are up to. These were some of my favorite sections in the book, as they provide a wry bit of satire that pokes what feels to me like gentle and loving fun at some of the worst tropes of the YA/Middle Grade fantasy/sci-fi genre. Though the summaries are typically only a few sentences, they are packed with plenty of the teenage angst, love triangles, and betrayals that seem inevitable when you're reading genre YA fiction. Yet even as Ness is making fun of genre tropes, I get the impression he has a sincere appreciation for those genres, so I never found the summaries to be too acerbic. A few in particular abounded with wit, and I often laughed at them.
As for the contemporary side, I will say this: Ness can write. His prose has a stark quality to it, though I don't think it's particularly spare. Sometimes when I read books, I feel like the author is overreaching when trying to make the reader feel for the characters, ending up tipping into melodrama. Not so with Ness. He has a plain way of stating the facts of his characters' struggles and laying them out in bald words that made me really feel their pain. This book deals with some gritty stuff: anorexia, Alzheimer's Disease, and obsessive compulsive disorder, just to name a few.
The family dynamic in this book is fraught, with Mike's and Mel's mother being an ambitious politician who tends to use her family to full effect, while their father is an alcoholic who can't deal with his wife's ambition. Their little sister, Meredith, is a prodigy, something their mother encourages with a lot of vigor. At first Meredith felt like a caricature, but then the book does something I was so happy to see a YA book doing: it fleshed her out and portrayed her as a full-fledged character, while also creating a very believable dynamic between her and her older siblings. This was another of my favorite aspects of the story, and I really enjoyed seeing how Mel, Mike, and Meredith learned to forge strong bonds with one another, clinging together even as their parents' blatant neglect of them threatens to tip each of them over the ledge. I was especially touched by later chapters, in which Meredith expresses her distress at the thought of being left behind by Mike and Mel when they go off to college the following year.
There's also a love triangle of sorts in the book: Mike is in love with his longtime friend Henna, who can't stop thinking about the new kid, Nathan. I didn't like this aspect of the book as much. Mike has a pretty unhealthy obsession with Henna, and some of his behavior is downright distasteful. I could never quite put my finger on Henna herself as some of her behavior seems kind of erratic--not as if she's going off the deep end or something, but more as if I never had a clear picture of who she was and what she stood for because those aspects of her personality seemed to keep changing. She puts up with more from Mike than I thought was realistic at times.
Mike's relationship with Jared is better, though there's a plot twist with regard to Jared I think I'd have preferred to have left out of the book entirely. Otherwise, I liked Jared and had a strong picture of him as a character. I liked how Ness explored Mike's jealousy at Jared's highly functional relationship with his father, but slowly peeled back the curtain so that Mike begins to understand that everyone has their own problems and issues, and that it's really not helpful to create an idealized view of others.
The urban fantasy aspect of the novel and the contemporary aspect of it collide on several occasions, and while I suspect Ness had a bit of a message here, that you don't have to be a person with mythic powers to experience a good deal of real life trauma and upheaval, when the worlds collide it feels too much like an interruption. Ultimately, I pretty much wished the urban fantasy elements had been chucked altogether, and that this book had been a straight-up contemporary book. I think it might have been stronger for it in the end.
Though I'm not going to lie: I kind of hope Ness writes that other book, the one about the Indie kids and their destinies.