Title: The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Author: Patrick Ness
Genre: YA Diverse Fantasy
Publication Date: Aug 27th, 2015
Pages: 317 (Hardback)
Publishers: Walker Books
Rating:
What if you aren’t the Chosen One? The one who’s supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?
What if you’re like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again.
Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.
Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions.
Award-winning writer Patrick Ness’s bold and irreverent novel powerfully reminds us that there are many different types of remarkable.
I actually enjoy the cover of this. It’s pretty simple and matches the story exactly. I also love that the hardback edition of this I got came with spray edges and the endpapers are gorgeous too!
The writing was fine. It was amazing and out of this world but it wasn’t bad either. I did enjoy that the author talked directly to the reader at times. I also liked that they added the additional summary of the ‘chosen one’ story at the start of each chapter so that everything made sense.
Well there isn’t a tonne that happens. There are a few big things that happen but nothing really major as the major things were happening to the ‘chosen one characters’ and only summarised in tiny paragraphs. Also, there were so many aspects of the plot that were just confusing because there was hardly any detail about them. Thye just happened and you’re sitting there thinking ‘Why? What? Huh?’.
I honestly didn’t feel any connection with any of the characters and I felt like most of them were kinda dull and flat. I do appreciate the diversity though! We have characters with anxiety, eating disorders, LGBT+ & different races. We also have the representation of an alcoholic father too, in no way is that the only way an alcoholic acts but I guess it could be a good representation. That is definitely not how I know it from personal experience.
Overall the idea of this book sounded amazing but the execution could have been done better. The book was overall underwhelming. The writing was okay, the plot was pretty dull and the characters were flat. The best thing in the book, in my opinion, is the diversity!
HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK? WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON IT?!
IF YOU ARE GOING TO SHARE SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS THEN PLEASE WARN IT SO OTHERS DON’T GET SPOILED!
3 replies on “The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness – Spoiler Free Review”
I didn’t love this one either. Something about it just didn’t tickle my fancy, you know? I hope your next read is a lot better, and great review!💗
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I just bought this one the other day. I haven’t read anything by Patrick Ness yet, though I’ve always been curious to see if it lives up to the expectation. I’ll have to read it soon and see for myself, I guess. Thanks for the great review!
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I haven’t read anything else by him. But I know a lot of his fans are saying that this book doesn’t represent how well he can write and a lot of people were disappointed in it. So I’m still going to give him another go with one of his other works.
Thanks.
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