Reviewed by Joséphine on
Initial thoughts: The opening chapter gave me pause for the extent to which it borrowed from the beginnings of Mrs Dalloway. You see, I didn't like that classic very much. I gave it 0.5 stars, although I could see what Virginia Woolf had meant to accomplish.
My worries were soon forgotten as Release was built on a similar framework but was a distinctly Patrick Ness book. What do I mean by that? The style, the vision, and the approach to storytelling were his — whimsical, raw, relatable and parts that felt just a little out of reach. They required the reader to work at even remotely grasping the point of everything.
When that "Aha!" moment came to me, I had to put down the book to revisit in my mind all that I had read, to make sense of the connections. With two stories running parallel — one contemporary, one paranormal — it did seem at first like two random books had been mashed together, not even necessarily of the same author.
When you think about it, that's life. We live our own, not paying much attention to strangers' lives and when we do, they can seem kind of like a fog. However, connected to every place, there are hundreds and thousands of lives and stories. Patrick Ness presented two that beyond a shared locale had no direct links, yet were remarkably intertwined in direction and in emotions.
As much as I'm struck by my love for Release, I have to hold back on 5 stars for this reason: the secondary plot meandered so much at times, that instead of being pulled into the dreamy atmosphere, I was pulled out of the primary plot. The connections only started to make sense in the second half of the book, which made the first half overly tedious to read and stay connected to.
In the end though, things came heart achingly full circle, and that in the span of a single day in the life of Adam Thorn.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 6 October, 2017: Finished reading
- 6 October, 2017: Reviewed