This is an extraordinarily moving novel about coming to terms with loss. The monster showed up just 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...The monster in his back garden, though, this monster is something different. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Costa Award winner Patrick Ness spins a tale from the final idea of much-loved Carnegie Medal winner Siobhan Dowd, whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself. Darkly mischievous and painfully funny, "A Monster Calls" is an extraordinarily moving novel of coming to terms with loss from two of our finest writers for young adults. This book is jacketed.
Initial thoughts: If I wake up in the morning with swollen red eyes, A Monster Calls is why. Even though this broke me, I wish I had read it much sooner. There was a time I desperately would have needed this because… catharsis; also the assurance that no matter how much we fear our twisted minds, we're much more complex than a single thought.
In some ways, A Monster Calls was predictable — a pre-determined skeleton of a story. Patrick Ness chose a narration style with few frills too and yet its complexity ran deep. It held small surprises that quickly added up. And though I knew right from the start how things would ultimately end, that didn't stop me from dissolving into tears for a good part of the book.
A teacher once told me that short stories are more difficult to write than long ones. If you can convince (or touch) with few words, that's when you have mastered the craft. This observation most definitely applies here. At 216 pages, less even as some spreads were illustrations sans words, this book is a short one. Clearly written for a younger reader, it still transcends age as it manages to speak to those of us who have left our childhood days behind.
