Release by Patrick Ness
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the first Patrick Ness I’ve read where I’m a little torn over the ending.
I literally loved the story-arc of Adam’s day, it contained a wealth of emotion and experience. That a lot of it was unresolved leads me a little to my overall feelings – but the point was not to resolve these experiences, but to highlight them. I understand that, and I now get to think about the resolutions I would like to have had, and what they probably would have been.
I love the realness, the ideas of sex, the weight of first-love, and the ways in which we find ourselves alone – or at least feel that way – and how we deal with that.
I’m torn over the second story that was told, that definitely had a place, but I think that place wasn’t as firmly linked to Adam’s as it could have been. Drug abuse in small towns is something that needs talking about, and this was a really clever way of showing the two-sides of the town we were in. But the story of the rose and where it ends up would have been a lot more powerful had there been even one small coming together of the two stories at some point before that. For me, there needed a bit of a stronger connection between the two stories.
I’ll certainly be putting this on the ‘must-read’ shelf for my children when they hit the YA reading level, and would encourage anyone with a 15-16+ child to consider giving it to them to read.
Ally Jane 