Ness has worked this kind of cross-genre magic before.

Of course, the adult reader-and the monster inside of Conor himself-suspect otherwise. Conor has come to believe he can count on his mother to share meals with him, to provide love, and to recover from her relapses. It's an appropriate kind of magic for Ness's story, which is all about the unpredictable nature of adult realities and how they buck up against the expectations we develop as children.

Another, it's compelling the boy to acts of surprising destruction. One moment, the monster is leaving yew saplings in Conor's floorboards. Though at first Conor believes that the monster follows certain concrete rules, arriving, for example, every night at precisely 12:07, it proves to be an inconstant force through the course of the story.

The magic here is wild, unpredictable, and organic. He'll tell him three stories, and then Conor will give one of his own in exchange. One night the yew tree in Conor's back yard comes alive. So, in the face of his mother's illness, Conor is shuffled off to stay with his grandmother, though he's not entirely sure why after all, his mother's cancer treatments have always worked before.īut Ness complicates what might otherwise be an edifying, instructive, and altogether hollow tale by overlaying it with rich fantasy. Though Conor is desperate for some real parental love, his father is more concerned with his next franchise, a baby with his new wife in America. In fact, Conor's first problem is compounded by a second, in the form of a disinterested father who has almost entirely disengaged from Conor's life. Ness introduces young readers to Conor, a boy who (you guessed it) has a problem: his mother is wasting away from cancer. On its surface, Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls (originally conceptualized by Siobhan Dowd and written by Ness after her death) might seem to have earned the appellation of problem novel. Teens likewise seem to feel a bit torn about them: though they're a touch more grounded in their familiar realities because they're fundamentally grittier than a lot of teen fare, they're also sometimes a bit embarrassing in their heavy handedness. Like 1971's Go Ask Alice, the supposedly real diary of a teen girl who is accidentally dosed with LSD and within months finds herself dead of a heroin overdose, these novels are both heavily pushed in high school English curriculums for their strong messages, and frequently banned for their risqué content. 'Problem' books are the paper equivalents of the after-school special, where some issue-an eating disorder or an abusive boyfriend or a teen pregnancy or even cancer-occurs and is neatly resolved over the course of a dozen or so chapters. The phrase 'problem novel' is almost universally used as a pejorative even within the world of young adult fiction.

A monster calls cover