A Monster Calls... life complicated

            A Monster Calls raises a lot of questions for me, first and foremost is at what age does this book become appropriate? The lexile rating is 730 and the topic, the loss or the potential loss of someone to cancer, probably make it ok for someone as young as 12 years old. However as I read it I thought that the way it was written created the need for an increased ability to read between the lines and to infer how and what emotional feelings were being felt or impelled by characters. The characters are consistent in how they hide their emotions and true feelings within themselves so as a reader we are only exposed to the narrator's words and they rarely describe the other character's emotional states directly. How many 12-15 year old students will be able to infer the emotional continuum that the Grandmother travels throughout the novel? Will they be able to understand how emotionally invested she is in the situation? Or how the mother feels trying to protect her son while navigating cancer and life?
       On the flip side I think the book addresses some of the teen angst common in all eras as well as the fact that life is often anti-sitcom. Conor, the books narrator, really struggles with his idea that nobody is accepting his reality and because of this all lines of communication are down. He is bullied and misunderstood. He believes that adults feel he is too young to understand yet his unwillingness to accept his mother's true condition illustrates the feelings we all feel at times, especially in these situations. Conor is not strongly self aware but he is acutely other aware and his self-imposed alienation pushes him further away from getting a chance to become more self aware. He feels as if he has no choice due to the gap in understanding from those around him. He is alone in the void. This angst is potentially a connection point for some teenagers.   The monster that calls on him is a great metaphor for feelings but I believe the monster also is a symbol that life is complicated. TVland would have us believe that all the world's problems can be tidied up in neat 30 minute segments like a sitcom but the monster and the tales he brings to Conor are not so simple. This may be the true magic of the book. Life is complicated.

        The illustrations are an excellent match to the ideas in the novel. They are complicated, without clean lines. They are barely controlled scribbles that are similar to how the ideas in the book show that life never fits within tidy little spaces. They also relate the idea of how scary it can be to stop looking outside yourself for the cause of a problem and having to do an internal inventory of yourself.  Over and out.