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 … 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.
A new YA novel from novelist Patrick Ness, author of the Carnegie Medal- and Kate Greenaway Medal-winning A Monster Calls and the critically acclaimed Chaos Walking trilogy, The Rest of Us Just Live Here is a bold and irreverent novel that powerfully reminds us that there are many different types of remarkable.
ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults * Cooperative Children’s Book Center CCBC Choice * Michael Printz Award shortlist * Six starred reviews * Kirkus Best Book of the Year * VOYA Perfect Ten * NYPL Top Ten Best Books of the Year for Teens * Chicago Public Library Best Teen Books of the Year * Publishers Marketplace Buzz Books * ABC Best Books for Children * Bank Street Best Books List
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Imagine a fantasy like Harry Potter — except the main character is some guy Mikey who doesn’t really even know the Chosen One except in passing. And all this crazy shit is going on in the world, but Mikey just wants to go to prom, graduate high school, and kiss a cute girl.
Anyone who loves a good YA paranormal or supernatural or fantasy novel will enjoy this tongue-in-cheek, clever novel.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness flips the chosen one myth on its head. Mike and his friends are just your typical teenagers except they live in a town much like the Hellmouth in Buffy. There’s been soul eating ghosts, vampires, and battling Gods. But this isn’t a story about the chosen one or the chosen few who fight evil and save the world from the apocalypse. It’s about everyone else, the ungifted, the ordinary, who want one last hoorah at prom before the school burns down (again). The chapter titles in TRoUJLH convey the story of the chosen ones while the chapters themselves tell of ordinary Mike and his ordinary friends in a story that is far from ordinary. TRoUJLH is satire at its best. It’s funny, irreverent, and original.
Verdict: Utterly charming.
Mikey is just an average guy. Sure, his family is a mess, but all Mikey wants is to graduate high school, leave this town, and get the courage to finally ask his crush out. That’s it. Yeah, weird things are happening in his town, glowing blue eyes and whatnot, but that’s not Mikey’s problem. Mikey just wants to finish his last school year with his friends before the indie kids blow up the high school. Again.
There are times when you just know you’re going to love a book. I knew I was going to love this book the second I found out that Patrick Ness was writing yet another book. Part of that was because Patrick Ness is an author god, but also, the premise is just too amazing! A book about a main character who is not the chosen one? Who just has to deal with the crap that the chosen one creates? YES PLEASE! I am so glad to say that this book exceeded my expectations. Yes, it’s that good.
My favorite part of this book has to be how it just pokes fun at all the YA tropes. First off, I need to explain some things. In the ‘world’ that this book takes place in, there are indie kids. Indie kids are basically the main characters of YA novels. They have weird names, are too cool for prom, and die a lot. Also, all the weird things that happen always seem to be related to them. There’s been soul-sucking ghosts, zombies, whatever, and the indie kids are always related to it. There was also mention of a few years ago where everything was vampires and romance (*cough* Twilight *cough*) and another mention of indie kids “dying beautifully of cancer”. Seriously, it hits all the tropes. I haven’t even hit all of them.
Mikey and his friends are essentially the classmates of the indie kids. They go to school with them and know them, but it’s like how you know your classmates. Still, they have to deal with the things the indie kids do. I really liked this unique perspective on this because it gives you an idea of what the ‘extras’ have to go through in books. Yeah, they notice the vampires, the zombies, and whatever. Mikey and his friends do have run-ins with the weirdness going on in fact, and some of it really affects them (some doesn’t. Because the weird things always go after the indie kids).
The main thing, though, is while this perspective is unique in the YA world, it’s really just normal. Mikey is normal. His friends are (mostly) normal. This book is mainly just about Mikey and his friends and I enjoyed reading about a normal group of friends just trying to have average lives, in their weird world. It also felt just so real. The characters have real problems. Mikey and his sister(s) have problems with their family, but Mikey also struggles with anxiety and OCD. Other characters also have very real struggles shown (though, Jared had some out-of-ordinary ones). And it was all shown realistically! It seems like it would be boring to read about, but I really liked it and I thought it was amazing!
Overall, I loved this book so much! It’s just so weird, so unique, so gosh darn interesting, and yes, very amusing at times. Please just pick up anything that this man writes.
Patrick Ness wrote one of my favorite series EVER (the CHAOS WALKING trilogy, which begins with The Knife of Never Letting Go), so I had high expectations for this book.
I liked the way Ness pokes fun at YA fantasy tropes and tries to address a lot of serious issues that we need to see more of in YA. Where CHAOS WALKING is all plot, this book has very little overarching plot or conflict. Rather, it’s a fun, character-driven read with lots of wittiness. Ultimately, it fell a little flat for me. The sibling relationships didn’t ring true, and I had some pretty major problems with the depiction of mental illness, which prevented me from loving the book.
Since Ness is clearly poking fun at many of the tropes of YA fiction, I found it hard to take him seriously about his own characters. He’s clearly mocking the “indie kids” throughout the whole book, but since he asserts by the end that the main characters and the indie kids are basically the same, I kinda felt like he was mocking the “normal kids” and their cliché feelings about the end of high school, graduation, the future, etc.
Quick read and not bad overall, but I had a hard time getting into the story, and the characters especially. Looking forward to discussing at BB book club this week!
While this book was not what I expected and definitely not what I wanted based on the premise, it was still unique and lovely and heartbreaking in a way I didn’t expect. Patrick Ness has a way of writing really warm and genuine casts of characters, and this book was worth it just for those voices!
So my real rating on this book is about three and a half stars. It’s a quick, fun read with some diverse characters, BUT it left me wanting more. I didn’t feel like the world they were living in was developed very well. They kept talking about magical disasters that happened in the past and I wanted to know more about that. POSITIVES: It’s a quick read with a contemporary feel , even though I would put this in the YA Fantasy category. Also I felt like the characters were very likeable and relatable, even if Mikey was kind of a butthead the whole time.
I think the fact that you get little glimpses of the “chosen one” story line is cool and helps to show how the rest of the world is so different if you aren’t an indie kid. I love fantasy and chosen one books but this one really showed how that even if you aren’t a chosen one you can still be important and loved no matter what. It was a refreshing change of pace. Definitely recommend it to anyone who likes to read those fantasy chosen one books so they can see the flip side.
In a world full of superheroes, this book decides to focus on the problems of the everyday kids and all of their normal teenage problems. A fresh concept, beautifully written.
Ness is always brilliant but I particularly love the whimsy here and reference to so many common YA tropes.
This is one of those rare books that I just don’t know how to put into words how I feel about. I honest to goodness don’t know what I am feeling right now. This book is not bad, but definitely did not connect with it. It was a surprisingly quick read for me, even though I wasn’t “into it”.
The premise of this book is shining a light on the regular people. The ones that don’t stand out. The ones that are not destined to save the world, stop an enormous evil, or be front and center for the next big “supernatural” or “fantsastical” thing. The ones that are near the action, but not a part of it. Think from the perspective of the nerdy girl in Bella Swan’s science class, Percy Jackson’s mother, or a random student from Ravenclaw House. So close to the action, but not really a part of it.
This book is about a group of friends in their senior year of high school. They are all dealing with their own struggles and are jumping their own hurdles just trying to make it to graduation. While these friends are living their lives, they encounter some of the “indie kids” that just happen to be the ones in the story that are engulfed in a “supernatural” happening.
Some of the best things about this novel are the characters. They are very relatable and I found myself rooting for the main character. I actually personally felt connected to the main character because I also suffer from anxiety. So some of the things that he struggled with hit close to home for me. There was not a character that I disliked in this book. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, to be quite honest. The story flowed very well.
At the beginning of each chapter, there was a paragraph describing what was happening with the “indie kids” as the story progressed. This describes the “supernatural” or “fantastical” elements. Very brief, and just enough to let you know that something was happening in the background, behind the normal lives of the main characters. Then the chapter would progress into the characters and their “normal” lives. I have to admit, when I read the synopsis for this book it really piqued my interest. I don’t exactly know what I was looking for, but after reading this I can say that it wasn’t found. I am not the biggest fan of contemporary pieces, and this book reads like a contemporary book. Since it read mostly like a contemporary book, the “supernatural” or “fantastical” things in the book seemed fake and out of place. It didn’t feel real. When you read a straight fantasy or supernatural book it feels real. This did not.
While the book did not read like I thought it would, I really appreciate what Ness was trying to do. It didn’t work for me personally, but this is a unique concept and it is well put together. I think that this could have been much more than what the finished product was. I would definitely recommend this book to others. Especially if they are looking for something with a new and interesting concept. I think that readers that are fans of a quirky read will love this most.
This was the book version of the “Zeppo” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved every second of it.
This book I feel will appeal to anyone, mixing together LBGT, fantasy, action, realistic fiction, horror and romance into a great story of mental illness, political mothers, drinking fathers, troubling romantic lives, and friends, telling the story of the people that aren´t the saviors, or the Chosen One, and the exact reverse of normal books, and the challenges that they would face with the indie kids in their town.
I am not a fan. It wasn’t what I expected at all.I found the book boring and hard to get into and the blurb did not reflect the story in the pages. I don’t want to ruin someone else’s experience but this book was wasted on me. I teach high school English and read a lot of YA books, but I couldn’t get past chapter 3 on this one.
I LOVED this book!
It took me a minute to grasp the structure. The main story (heroes–indie kids– fighting great evil in a sort of Harry Potter spoof) happens as an afterthought in small summaries at the beginning of each chapter. The story the novel focuses on is about the non-chosen ones and it’s wonderful, full of humor, insightful, with a romantic twist, dabbling about personal choices and mental illness. The characters are diverse, and I loved all of them. I could not put it down and loved it until the very end.
I highly recommend!
An interesting narrative style leads to an equally interesting story premise – how do the “normal” people in heroic quest books live while their peers must save the world?
The storyline is believelable and told in a compelling way. It’s literature that’s also a quick read – a great upgrade to the idea of a beach read!
One of my favorite books.
One of my favorite books of all time. Super religional, fun, and at times super relatable
This book was such a unique spin on the whole “teens must save the world from …” type of story. As the title implies, we get to see what happens with the REST of the teenage population while the chosen ones are off doing whatever they do to make sure the end of the world is averted.
I especially loved that most of the characters were “flawed” in some obvious way. It made them more instantly relatable. The chapter titles were amusing and entertaining. And the ending was less “happily ever after” and more a feeling of having closure, but not tied up in a pretty little bow.
I definitely recommend this story to a Middle School or High School audience, or those of us adults who enjoy reading YA literature. And if you’re not a fan of the paranormal, I think you’d still enjoy this book as the focus is on the normalcy of everyone else.
The fantasy and Scyfy got in the way of the narrative. It felt too small of a world and too shallow of an understanding.