My rating: green3

(3.25 stars)

Hello everybody! It’s time for another review, and the book of choice is The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness. When I first heard about this book, I was really excited to read it. I mean really excited. It’s about the people on the sidelines,like Mike and his friends, that don’t get to participate in all the “saving the world” activities, but live through it anyway. And maybe that affected me somehow, like I put my high expectations onto the book, because I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. I read it and didn’t really find the book that enjoyable till the deer incident. Then it gets a bit more interesting as far as I’m concerned.

There were some things I liked about it. Like the idea of what to do when the world seems like it doesn’t want you to act, but react to it. How would you function in such a powerless situation? Mike and his friends have different ways of coping with this, but in order to move on, they have to let go these mechanisms and establish better ones. Also, there were those little summaries at the beginning of each chapter as to what “the indie kids” were up to, which I found funny. And those descriptions about what the indie kids were like in the eyes of other people were absolutely hilarious.

What I didn’t like were a few characters in the book, such as Henna until the end. It just seemed like she was playing with Mike’s feelings for a while, even at the beginning. Nathan appeared like a shady character as well, since Mike doesn’t like him and I saw him through that kind of perception. For a while there, I thought that Mike was right about him, but then had to remind myself that Mike has proved himself to be a bit more unreliable than most narrators.

This was the first book I read by Patrick Ness, and while it didn’t meet my expectations, it turned out to be pretty good at the end. That is why I gave this novel a 3.25 star rating. Those are my initial thoughts about this book. Have you read or any other books by Patrick Ness? If you did, what did you think of it? I’d love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below. Have a nice day and keep reading!

-Sumaya

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