Review: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Monster Calls is one of those books I picked up due to the hype. It spent a long time sitting on the huge to-read pile blocking the sunlight from entering my room, but in the end I managed to work my way around to it. In fact, I was surprisingly keen to give this one a read.

In the past, I have read other Patrick Ness books. I really enjoyed the Chaos Walking trilogy and the connected little stories – I admit to being a bit tentative at the start of the series, but I came to really enjoy the story. I’ve also read The Rest of Us Just Live Here, which I didn’t enjoy anywhere near as much but it was still an okay read. There are other Patrick Ness books I wish to read – namely More Than This – but first I decided to give the one everyone seems to love a read.

If I’m being completely honest, I spent a lot of A Monster Calls considering a three star rating. It was an okay story, but it wasn’t really doing much for me. It was a story I was able to power through, one that kept me interested yet failed to pull any real emotions from me. However, this changed towards the end of the book. I’m not one for great displays of emotion, but this one had me in tears. Literal blurred vision, wet cheeks, whimpering tears. Thus, I decided it was well deserving of the four star rating.

I know many people enjoy this book a lot more than I did, and I can understand why, yet for me I felt as though it was only the latter part of the book that managed to display the deep emotions connected to the storyline. It was a very interesting tale, it came with a very deep message, but the start of the book could have been any old story. Despite knowing where the story was going through the comments made here and there, the start of the tale could have been used in such a large variety of ways. It’s only towards the end of the book, when the emotions hit hardest and the events start coming together, that I felt it became truly clear where the story was going.

It’s not that this book is messy, far from it. It simply failed to hit the right spots until we were a decent way through. If I were to split this story into two parts – the start and the end – I would be giving two very different ratings. The start of the book was decent enough, but I was merely reading it to see what the fuss was about – through it being such a short tale, I was happy to work through page after page with the knowledge of something more being around the corner. The end of the book really hit me, it had me feeling all kinds of emotions and threatened to rip me apart – it felt like the completion of something much bigger, a conclusion on a much larger scale.

Overall, it is difficult for me to say how I truly feel about this one. I did not love it in the way I had hoped to, nor did I hate it. There were ups and downs – in so many different ways – and whilst it didn’t give me what I had expected, it did manage to deliver a story that touched me.

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