![]() ![]() ![]() His brutal, brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy is perilously close to the kind of fantasy he's lampooning here, and those books (starting with 2008's The Knife of Never Letting Go) are richer, denser and much more intense than this lighter novel. If anyone's qualified to weigh the two conflicting extremes of YA fiction, it's Ness. The Rest Of Us is playful about the bookshelf tension between YA poles, while still pointedly suggesting that actual teenage problems are more nuanced than Buffy The Vampire Slayer-type metaphorical crises. Ness takes a flippant potshot at John Green's The Fault In Our Stars ("This is worse than when they were all dying beautifully of cancer," Henna says, after the latest indie-kid fatality), but his book does fall squarely into the current "contemporary realistic" YA trend Green helped kick off. But the book is authentic and emotional about Mikey's problems, treating his OCD as a serious, compelling medical concern, and sympathizing with his low self-esteem. It's nearly a flippant YA satire: The indie kids' adventures are largely expressed in brief chapter headings, but even a slight taste of the story reveals that they have ridiculous names, live wildly dramatic lives and make and discard deep, perfect true-love connections with implausible speed. Ness walks a cautious line with The Rest Of Us Just Live Here. With turmoil at home and school, it's easy to decide that the walking-dead cop with glowing blue eyes is somebody else's problem - especially since this is just the latest apocalypse in a long series. Meanwhile, Mikey's mother is running for national office, and his father is a disintegrating alcoholic. Graduation is looming, with the inevitable separation from his friends. that group with the cool-geek haircuts and the thrift shop clothes" fight battles, gain powers and share life-changing kisses, Mikey navigates a longstanding crush on his friend Henna, struggles with OCD and worries about his anorexic sister. Mikey, Ness' first-person narrator, is never going to be the Chosen One. They just have their own problems to deal with instead. Ness' protagonists know something major and magical is going on. Or the ordinary teenagers watching from the corners of the school cafeteria as the Cullens play out their mopey vampiric soap operas. They're more like the dazed, baffled bystanders Buffy saves when Sunnydale's Mayor becomes a giant snake. The Rest Of Us follows a few normal high-schoolers who aren't in charge of averting the upcoming apocalypse. The twist: Ness' book isn't about those kids at all. That's entirely deliberate Ness' story takes place on the edges of a supernatural romance, where inimical otherworldly powers called the Immortals are invading, and only an emotional, exceptional group of teenagers can stop them. ![]() Patrick Ness' tongue-in-cheek young-adult novel The Rest Of Us Just Live Here doesn't co-opt classic literature, but it still feels like that kind of book, like whatever was shelved next to it sprung a leak, and some drama seeped in from a completely different world. We talk about "falling into a book" or "getting sucked into a story" because the best reads feel like real physical places, and these kinds of meta-stories play with that feeling to see what it says about how characters work. Books like John Myers Myers' Silverlock, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series and Mike Carey's Unwritten comic all operate as though book covers are permeable, allowing characters to slip off their pages and sneak along the bookshelves to see what's going on in the next tale over. For lifelong literature fans, there's a special kind of joy in stories that play with stories. ![]()
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