Winter Recommended Reading

During the school year I try to read a couple of books from the CMS library. Here are three books I have particularly enjoyed in the last few months.

At the top of my list is A Monster Calls, by British writer Patrick Ness. Conor, the main character, is a 12 year old boy whose mother is suffering from cancer. One evening, just after midnight, a monster appears at his bedroom window. The catch is that this monster, which has emerged from a large yew tree up the hill from Conor’s house, is not the monster that Conor has been expecting. It is not, in other words, the monster of his recurring nightmare. This monster is ancient and wild, but not malicious. He has been summoned to help, he tells Conor, and that will require facing the wild truth.

Conor has more to worry about than his mother’s illness. A bully at school has singled him out for special attention, Conor’s emotionally distant and bossy grandmother is making his life difficult, and his father lives across the Atlantic with a new wife and baby daughter. And, of course, there is the monster, who tells confusing tales and warns Conor that he will have to tell his own tale or remain forever trapped in the nightmare.

In a book with “monster” in the title, a reader might expect more of the supernatural. However, Conor’s story is most interesting to me when Ness shows us Conor doing battle with the emotional demons that all of us, sooner or later, will have to face with honesty and courage if we are ever to be free of them.

Another book I thoroughly enjoyed is Claire Legrand's Some Kind of Happiness. Finley, the novel's 12 year old narrator, goes on a quest to learn why her father disowned his tightly knit family years before Finley was born. She enlists the aid of cousins she meets when her parents send her to live with her grandparents while mom and dad work out their marital difficulties. Finley also finds help from a family that she has been told to stay away from. This book about family secrets and the family ties that bind will captivate readers.

Family secrets are also at the center of A Corner of White, the first novel in the Colors of Madeleine fantasy trilogy by Jaclyn Moriarty. The story unfolds in parallel worlds: the streets of present-day Cambridge, England, where Madeleine must come to terms with a tight money situation and a mother who may be dangerously ill. In the Kingdom of Cello, where some colors can be dangerous, Elliott struggles to understand his father's disappearance. All is not what it seems in this beautifully written novel.