[GUEST POST] Release - Patrick Ness

More GUEST POST goodness from the amazing Keith Reynolds!

Inspired by Mrs Dalloway and Judy Blume's Forever, Release is one day in the life of Adam Thorn, 17. It's a big day. Things go wrong. It's intense, and all the while, weirdness approaches...

Adam Thorn is having what will turn out to be the most unsettling, difficult day of his life, with relationships fracturing, a harrowing incident at work, and a showdown between this gay teen and his preacher father that changes everything. It's a day of confrontation, running, sex, love, heartbreak, and maybe, just maybe, hope. He won't come out of it unchanged. And all the while, lurking at the edges of the story, something extraordinary and unsettling is on a collision course.

Adam is not having a good day. What I liked most about all of it though was the steady pace of it kept me enthralled. Despite Adam’s emotional highs (cute friendships and a soupçon of sex) and lows (basically everything else), my interest didn’t wane. I kept wanting to see what horrible bit of news will finally break Adam.

I got the sense that it was all building to one big explosion of emotion a wonderful, cathartic event like a kiss in an thunderstorm, a dramatic declaration of love in front of the whole school, or a winning performance at regionals that magically fixes everything. Only it never happened, the denouement was understated, and believable.

Interestingly, that’s only half the story, as Adam’s narrative is broken up by a fantastical journey of a murdered woman’s spirit. Accompanied by a faun as her guide, the spirit drifts through the world to significant places in her past life confronting people who failed her. It was a strange choice. Unlike other books that I’ve read recently with cataclysmic, world ending subplots (We are the Ants, At the Edge of the Universe), this one was far more abstract. It, in some ways, suggested that the world would end if the spirit didn’t complete her journey, but it was so removed from the main plot that I never considered it part of the stakes. I didn’t care.

I often asked myself if it was filler, or if it would link back to Adam’s story. Was this really bad day a preamble to a murder mystery? No. Was the spirit going to reveal something fundamental about Adam’s character? Not really. It was a little distracting, but overall wasn’t significant enough to ruin my overall impression of the book.

Full of small events that punctuated Adam’s horrible day, Release was just that, a release. It was satisfying and complete even with the magical interludes.

Keith Reynolds is a social media consultant and writer based out of Vancouver. Follow him on twitter: twitter.com/slothra or check out his personal website: http://keithreynolds.ca/

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