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Compelling YA novel speaks to all ages
Book Review
By Derryll White
Ness, Patrick (2015). The Rest of Us Just Live Here.
I really enjoy young adult novels (YA) based on high school experiences, probably because my own years there were so amazingly bad. So bad in fact that I never graduated, choosing the education of the open road instead.
Mikey Mitchel and his sisters Mel and Meredith drive this novel. They take in a lot of territory. Mel has an eating disorder that killed her (for four minutes). Mike has OCD that he struggles with. Meredith is a lovely young genius sister who is included in everything. There is a strong cast of supporting characters as well. Jared Shurin is Mikey’s best friend and a quarter God. Henna Silvennoinen is Mikey’s love interest and key to his opening up to accept the world.
Patrick Ness takes on so many issues here that it is sometimes staggering. There is inclusion/exclusion in high school, in fact the whole need for people to have groups of like-minded people. Also, power and prestige and why it might actually be important is another theme touched on. Mostly, however, the need for love of self and others consistently echoes throughout the novel.
There is this world, and parallel ones that almost everyone has embraced at one time or another. All of it gets pulled into an intriguing novel that keeps the reader turning the pages. Patrick Ness has produced a compelling YA novel that speaks to all ages.
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Excerpts from the novel:
INDIE KIDS – You’ve got them at your school, too. That group with the cool-geek haircuts and the thrift shop clothes and names from the fifties. Nice enough, never mean, but always the ones who end up being the Chosen One when the vampires come calling or when the alien queen needs the Source of All Light or something. They’re too cool to ever, ever do anything like go to the prom or listen to music other than jazz while reading poetry. They’ve always got some story going on they’re heroes of – the rest of us just have to live here, hovering artound the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.
THE PAST – The indie kids back then, who were probably called hipsters or something, fought and some of them died and a crack opened in the ground and ate a whole neighborhood, but of course the Gods and Goddesses were defeated in the end because we’re all still here. They were sent back to wherever they’d come from, and the world, as it always does, got on with pretending it never happened. The crack was put down to a volcanic earthquake, and history forgot.
LIFE – But I don’t care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don’t think they’re real or important or you think that we’ll all grow out of this nonsense, well that’s not really my business. I can’t tell you what’s real for you.
But in return, you can’t say what’s real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.
MEDICATION – “I never wanted to go back on it.”
“You told me, just now, just today, that you’d rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don’t think your suffering is fake. I don’t think these feelings about wanting it to end are false. I don’t think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it’s fake?”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
