Our first official book club night was hosted by the Cox's at their gorgeous converted school house, the beautiful summer evening enabling us to enjoy the patio as well as the host's choice of literature.
Two of our group hadn't managed to complete the book in time for the club meeting, but we employed the rules of book club:
1) you need to at least get to page 50 if you hate the book
2) if you haven't read it in time - tough - expect spoilers
Teen literature seems to be a growing fascination for adult readers, we all agreed that we LOVED the Hunger Games, lived for Harry Potters next installment and some of the group had also read a number of other novels by Patrick Ness that all work within the same sort of context: exploration of believable characters whose story is told within a surreal world.
As adults, and often in adult literature, the world we live in and read about is firmly contained within understood boundaries (the law, religion, moral code, physics(!), books can shock us when they push against the boundaries, but rarely are they as 'other' as novels such as 'More Than This'. The 'otherness' is liberating, it allows adults to completely extract ourselves and our thoughts from what is expected and to 'suspend disbelief' something we all agreed Patrick Ness achieved in spades in this novel.
We all agreed, that reading is a form of escape, an opportunity to be absorbed into something else - to be 'in the moment' and not thinking about the dinner or doing 17 things at once (Si :) ).
If you read the Wikipedia synopsis, you might think 'what on earth is this book?' but when we read the book, we found ourselves engaged and desperate to know what was happening next. Most of us read the book very quickly.
We had some theories about the novel, one being that the whole episode of Seth Wearing's life described in the novel was merely a dream - a very elaborate episode of lucid dreaming. Maybe, maybe not.... Patrick Ness is not quick to explain his novels - 2 of our group had recently been to see him speak, he was deliberately coy. I imagine his intention will be to stimulate interpretation and evaluation - these are both personal - and also give his novels educational value.
We all agreed that we enjoyed or were enjoying the book - we didn't agree on a star rating - will open this to comments.
Ed.
Other reviews:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/07/more-than-this-ness-review
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21969786-more-than-this
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/children_sbookreviews/10376926/More-Than-This-by-Patrick-Ness-review.html
NEXT NOVE: Hunger, by Susan Hill
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