I was a little skeptical when I was handed our reading selection for the September meeting of the Magee Books-n-Lunch Club. The title wasn’t “adult”— A Monster Calls. It was a thinner book, much shorter than our usual 300+ pages. Thumbing through, I saw illustrations on almost every page, like a children’s picture book.
“It’s a YA book,” our librarian announced, as if that would make us feel better about this departure from our usual fare.
YA stands for Young Adult, a poliltically correct term for “teenager,” a stage of life I barely remember.
I don’t make a habit of reading YA novels, but there are some excellent ones out there, like Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Harris and Me by Gary Paulsen and the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins.
If the story is well-written enough, there’s a reason for adults to read YA novels. The tale telling becomes dramatic irony for an adult — the child or teen character in the story doesn’t have the insight into life yet to figure out his situation. But because we adults have been children and teenagers, we have the experience to have made sense of those years, so we can read with more understanding of what the characters go through.
The idea for this fantasy novel came from author Siobhan Dowd, but she died of cancer before being able to write it. Patrick Ness took the idea and wrote the book, which has been made into a film and a play.
Conor O’Malley, a 13-year-old English boy, lives with his mother, who has a serious form of cancer. His father has deserted them and started a new life and family in America, and even when he comes to England to see his son and his very ill ex-wife, he is detached and grudging about his responsibilities to them. Conor’s only adult support is his grandmother, a busy career woman from whom Conor feels distant. He is a young teenager who faces and fears the prospect of living alone.
At school, his best friend spreads the news that his mother has “the big C,” and now he has nowhere that he can pretend that life is normal.
As many real young people are, Conor is haunted by a nightmare in which his mother is falling over a cliff, but he lets go of her hand instead of “saving” her, which he believes to be his responsibility. He feels fear, denial, isolation and guilt.
Everything in the plot still seems normal up to that point, however, until one night a “monster” comes calling. In what is at first an imaginative stretch for the reader, the monster is a huge old yew tree from the neighboring church’s graveyard. The anthropomorphized tree looks in through Conor’s window and begins to challenge him, returning often, threatening, cajoling and eventually helping the boy to untangle his complex feelings about his mother’s dire condition.
The book’s ideas are complex but somehow simple. Even the yew tree is a symbol of the complexities of life: it symbolizes both longevity and death, and as we read on, the idea of a huge yew tree as a confidante begins to seem normal to those of us who grew up on tales of “The Little Engine That Could,” “Dumbo, the Flying Elephant” and Jack running up and down a beanstalk to talk to a giant in the clouds.
The reactions of Conor, his mother, his father and his grandmother are realistic to us because we have known so many people who have gone through a serious health crisis— and we have watched that person’s child have to cope with a crisis he or she shouldn’t have to experience. Like Conor, they are having to grow up before their time.
The illustrations in this book deserve special recognition. They aren’t the usual soft, comforting or amusing pictures that would attract children to a story. They’re rather severe. Artist Jim Kay created a special style for his artwork in this book that is at first off-putting, until you come to realize that they reflect the serious theme of the plot and the nightmare quality of the dreams Conor has.
The colors are limited to black and shades of gray. Kay says he experimented with ways to distress the drawings and the paper they were drawn on to give the illustrations a heavily textured, bristly and dark, dream-like expression. The shadowy artwork seems in keepingwith Conor’s feelings of loss, despair and confusion, and I took almost as much time examining them as I did the plot.
You may be able to get the book at your local library, or you can purchase it online. And if you want the cheapest source, I found the complete text printed on the site readerslibrary.org
A Monster Calls is well worth placing under your reading lamp, and despite its YA designation you will have an adult experience reading it.
