Tag: Review

Book Review: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

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monster

Heartbreaking tale about facing up to your worst fears

About the Book

Description (courtesy of Goodreads): ‘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.

Book Facts

  • Format: Hardback
  • Publisher: Walker Books
  • No. of pages: 216
  • Publication date: 27th September 2011
  • Genre: Children’s Fiction

My Review (5 out of 5)

This is a book I shall remember for a long time that works on so many different levels. Yes, it’s categorised as a book for children and the way the story is told is accessible for a child. In the edition I read, the wonderful illustrations add to this accessibility. But the fact that it has also been embraced by adults is testament to the skill of the writer in communicating a message to which anyone who has ever faced the actuality or prospect of loved one can relate.

It seems to me the monster represents Conor’s fears and anger about his mother’s illness and the prospect of losing her that he finds so hard to face. But also his guilt that he can’t save her and guilt at the agonising ‘truth’ the monster says he must face up to.  So much guilt, that Conor actually craves punishment.

‘He was going to be punished. It was finally going to happen. Everything was going to make sense again…Punishment was coming.’

The tales the monster tells convey the message that there are other ways of looking at things, that people can’t be divided into good and evil and that their intentions and feelings may be hidden and contrary to their public face.  Could Conor have got it wrong about his awful Grandma after all? Of the many striking scenes is that in his Grandmother’s house when Conor unleashes his pent-up anger – and gets a surprising reaction.

Apart from the book’s ending, I found one of the most moving aspects to be Conor’s sense of loneliness and isolation. Because people don’t know what to say to him, they say nothing, to the point where he feels as if he’s invisible.

As Conor’s mother says, ‘The green things of this world are just wondrous, aren’t they?’ and it’s so clever that the monster should be formed from a yew tree which is a source of drugs used to fight cancer.

A wonderful book.

This book forms part of my From Page to Screen Reading Challenge. I shall be doing a separate post with my comparison of the book and the film.

To buy a copy of A Monster Calls from Amazon.co.uk, click here

In three words: Powerful, moving, involving

NessAbout the Author

Patrick Ness, an award-winning novelist, has written for England’s Radio 4 and Sunday Telegraph and is a literary critic for The Guardian. He has written many books, including the Chaos Walking Trilogy, The Crash of Hennington, Topics About Which I Know Nothing, and A Monster Calls. He has won numerous awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Booktrust Teenage Prize, and the Costa Children’s Book Award. Born in Virginia, he currently lives in London.

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Book Review: Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

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reservoir

Beautifully written novel about the impact of tragedy on a small village

About the Book

Description (courtesy of Goodreads): Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must. As the seasons unfold there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. Bats hang in the eaves of the church and herons stand sentry in the river; fieldfares flock in the hawthorn trees and badgers and foxes prowl deep in the woods – mating and fighting, hunting and dying. Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a stranger’s tragedy refuse to subside…

My Review

This is the first book by Jon McGregor I have read and therefore his writing style was completely new to me: unusual and rather wonderful.

Although the starting point for the novel is the mystery of the missing girl, the hunt for her is not the main focus of the book. Rather like a pebble thrown into a pond, it is the ripples that flow from this event – the effect on the village and the people who inhabit it – that the author concentrates on. The routine of daily life through the changing seasons is mirrored by the changes in the natural world. Particularly striking is the way the author moves seamlessly between the two:

“She wound the babies’ mobiles, and listened to the whirring tunes, watching the snails and frogs turning circles in the sunlight. She’d closed the door behind her before the music had stopped. The badgers in the beech wood fed quickly, laying down fat for the winter head.”

The book also charts the changes that affect certain families in the village: births, marriages, break-ups, deaths. Annual events take place in the village, each year less and less influenced by the tragedy of the missing girl. I liked the fact that certain phrases were repeated but with slight alterations, like a chorus with a word or two changed each time it is sung.

“The girl had been looked for; in the beech wood, in the river, in the hollows at Black Bull Rocks.”

“The girl had been looked for at the flooded quarry…She had been looked for in the caves along the river…”

“She had been looked for, everywhere.”

In spite of everything I loved about the book – the lyrical, inventive writing – I found myself ever so slightly disappointed at the end. Maybe that’s always the way with a book that promises so much!  I guess I was hoping for answers that were not provided – perhaps that was intentional by the author. I also found that, for me, as time went on the links between the missing girl and what was happening to the families in the village became less relevant, almost imperceptible…but again perhaps that was the point the author was trying to make.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Fourth Estate, in return for an honest review.

Book facts: 336 pages, publication date 9th April 2017

My rating: 4.5 (out of 5)

In three words: Lyrical, poetic, original

Try something similar…Autumn by Ali Smith

To pre-order/buy Reservoir 13 from Amazon, click here

jon-mcgAbout the Author

Jon McGregor is a British author who has written four novels. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was nominated for the 2002 Booker Prize, and was the winner of both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2003. So Many Ways to Begin was published in 2006 and was on the Booker prize long list. Even the Dogs was published in 2010 and his newest work, Reservoir 13, is due in April 2017.  Author Website

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