The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Author: Patrick Ness
Genre: YA/ Special People (Kind of)
Grade: B
Mikey and his friends live in a word where the super-powered kids among them battle demons and evil on the side and the normal kids just want to get through senior year without the high school blowing up. (Again.) About halfway through this book I started thinking John Hughes movie from back in the day and could not get that out of my mind.
Overall I liked this but it did suffer from the expectations versus reality thing. Reading the blurbs and the synopsis of the book I was under the impression that this would be a story from the point of view of the sidekick kind of thing.
The end of the world action is literally a paragraph that starts each chapter while Mikey and his family and friends do deal with some of the strange phenomenon the major part of the story is 90% about every single thing a high school book could be about. Eating disorders, unrequited love, being new in school, gay friends, drunk parents, over the top parents, adorable little sisters, prom…
And Mikey is a pretty typical teenager. Sometimes I was impressed by how smart he was but more often I wanted to slap him for being rude, whiny and occasionally purposefully cruel to the people around him.
Boy, I’m in a cynical mood tonight!
This book was good but much like A Madness So Discreet I felt like it was trying to be a lot things and trying to be deep and meaningful and falling short of the mark. There was a lot of interesting ideas but they were mostly related to the stories you weren’t seeing. (The Gods, battle for the world, even Mikey’s mother’s political career.) I was expecting it to be something like the old episodes of Buffy where you’d see the action through Xander and Willow’s eyes and instead it felt more like an after school special.
Recommend: 50/50 Just double-check any expectations you have and go from there.
Leave a Reply