More Than This by Patrick Ness

This is the book for you if you like having to think A LOT.  The first half was quite confusing -  it starts with a boy dying and BAM... here we are in some strange place. Is it the after life? Is it the underworld? Is it hell? It’s completely baffling and really alien for both the reader and the main character. He has no idea what’s going on either and for whatever reason can’t remember his previous life and it comes back to him in random, often traumatic flashbacks. 


After spending around 75 pages with our main character seemingly the only person in this strange, new world, two new people suddenly ride up and rescue him from what looks to be Death (if Death drove a van and dressed like a biker). These two new characters are here to confuse us further with their garbled explanations of what is going on. 
As you read on, things are explained in a bit more depth through logical conclusions, a fair bit of guesswork and some more trusty flashbacks. You can piece together an understanding and this is when the book in my opinion becomes a lot more enjoyable and the plot a lot more interesting. The idea of the main plot (I won’t say what it is because that’s quite a big reveal in the book and I don’t want to spoil it to much), has been done by a couple of books before and I really like how this one was done. It’s a cool idea to explore how people can’t tell the difference between normal life and a convincing lie of the life they think they’re living. It’s also kind of freaky when you consider that again they don’t actually know what’s going on beyond what they have been programmed to think.It’s like the question of what if you were the last person on earth? What would you do if everyone else suddenly disappeared or died and you were left alone with only a small group of people to rebuild civilisation?






I thought this was a great book with an intriguing and quite real plot line, but I definitely think this book could do with a sequel. There were so many interesting points introduced that could be developed further into something that I would definitely read.





Image copyright: Walker Books

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