A Monster Calls - Patrick Ness

[goodreads]

Title: A Monster Calls
Author: Patrick Ness
Genre: YA
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 215
Date read: November, 2015

The monster showed up after midnight. As they do.

But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting. He's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming...

This monster is something different, though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.

It wants the truth.


I'm not entirely sure what I think of this book... I think I wanted to like it more than I ultimately did. I appreciated what Patrick Ness tried to do, and did think it an interesting way to handle grief in a book, but parts of it fell very flat to me.

Most of all, I was really annoyed by Conor's grandmother and father. Both seemed distant to the point of almost being cruel. I know we only saw things through Conor's eyes, but surely Conor's father could see that Conor needed him more than his new family did.

I'd guessed the Monster's reason for walking at an early stage, but that was one part that did work for me, and which I found very touching.

As a whole, it's a book I'm glad to have read, but not one I think I'd be likely to recommend to others. Apparently this is being turned into a movie? I have a hard time seeing how that would work. It'd certainly make for a very dark and depressing one.