Article written by Ashleigh Lowry and Rory Hawkins.
Unless you’re a steady reader of Young Adult fiction, odds are the genre looks and is very worn out. Self-doubt, the supernatural, love triangles – oh my! If you’ve read any of our previous articles on avoiding tropes, you’ll know we’re sticklers for anything too overplayed. And yet, with Ashleigh covering the Authentic Teen Voices literature panel, we thought it only appropriate to discuss a YA novel this month.
Our choice? Patrick Ness’ The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Already a well-established and award winning sci-fi/YA writer, Ness tries his hand at penning something less out-of-this-world and into one even more terrifying and incomprehensible: the teenage mind.
Rest of Us follows teenager Michael “Mikey” Mitchell (don’t you worry, the names get worse) as he navigates the last weeks of high school. Between a stressful home life, exams, confessing love to a friend, strange blue lights, dying classmates and his own anxieties, can Mikey last the distance?
Ashleigh:
I don’t want to start off on a bad note, but here goes... I don’t like the writing style. Written in first-person from the protagonist’s perspective, fine, but their inner voice is just all over the place. From the beginning, it read like a draft-version. Sometimes it felt so clunky I had to backtrack just to know who was talking or what it was about.
Rory:
I’ve read a few of Ness’ other novels – his Chaos Walking trilogy and stand-alone More Than This – so I thought I’d be familiar with his writing style. Even in shifting a little more to YA, Ness really honed in on Mikey and his innermost thoughts and feelings. True, he rambles and whines a lot, but that feels appropriate to his character.
Ashleigh:
Still, that didn’t help the plot or backstory. He and other characters speak very haphazardly about past 'world threatening' events that had happened – vampires, gods, soul-sucking ghosts, etcetera – always referring to the people who saved the day as ‘indie kids’. To begin with, it’s glossed over.
Rory:
Agreed. When it was first mentioned, I had to read over that bit again: was he talking about past events or was an older Mikey recounting what was to come? It just came down to the characters only referring to these events out of worry. I liked how consistent that theme was, characters not wanting to be involved with more than they were already dealing with.
Ashleigh:
Mikey and his friends see these past phenomenons as an inconvenience more than anything else. Meanwhile, their parents’ generation had all the same problems but aren’t willing to talk about them! Metaphor much? To Ness’ credit, that’s also a question I’ve wondered in 'teen saves the world' novels: what happens to everyone else?
Rory:
You can tell he was trying to put a new spin on 'you don’t have to be special'. The blurb reads ‘Not everyone has to be the Chosen One’, but neither of us expected how fully that would run its course, especially with the chapter headers telling you what ‘the indie kids’ were up to.
Ashleigh:
I loved the micro-fiction at the beginning of each chapter! Whilst Mikey was dealing with everyday issues, you had background characters fighting interdimensional beings – and you can see all the tropes of standard YA. We both thought the two storylines would overlap more; instead, it was like they were being told in tandem.
Rory:
I really warmed to the book’s 'everyman' focus. One of Mikey’s anxieties is not feeling good enough, as if he should be always be better. That’s something I really empathise with. The plot took a little time to talk about how we address (what we perceive as) our inadequacies, finding out how we’re not 'special' in a broader and grander, unrealistic sense.
Ashleigh:
There’s some really touching lines in Rest of Us. My personal favourite: ‘Anxiety is a feeling grown large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous.’ That said, I still can’t fully overlook the tropes in Mikey’s story arc.
Rory:
I know! Ness makes all these ironic comparisons between YA and real life, yet his characters are like bingo cards. Obsessive-compulsive, high anxiety, sexually confused, friend-zoned – and that’s just Mikey! Granted, there is some emotional payoff, but I thought it a little excessive. And don’t get me started on the 'love polygon'...
Ashleigh:
Now I’ve finished reading and have thought it over, I’m feeling more neutral towards Rest of Us. Ness had some really nice thoughts around our problems while growing up, but the prose and most of the characters had me on edge more than a few times. Jared, though – the goddess of cats’ grandson – easily the best character! I don’t feel like I’ve wasted time, but there’s nothing making me want to reread it.
Rory:
I’m not sure what I expected. I like Ness as an author, but I’m not a fan of where YA is at the moment. I couldn’t help being more critical of how his characters dealt (or didn’t) with their problems. At times, it was like an unfunny comedy of errors. The plot wasn’t overly complicated, but then the emotional substance had a lot more depth to it than most YA. I’d like to think Rest of Us is very ironic, but I don’t know if the intended audience would get that.
Patrick Ness’ The Rest of Us Just Live Here certainly gave us a lot to think about – where plot should focus in a story, and how to explore that to its strengths. However, though unconventional and bold in subject matter, it still slipped into familiar YA territory. But for any of our gripes, we still recommend giving it a try. Between the teenage rebellion and heartache, there’s some truly insightful moments for the rest of us.
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