The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls is a small book with a temperament too large for its pages: concise in language, volcanic in feeling. At its barest level it is the narrative of Conor O’Malley, a boy living in the daily suspense of his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited one night by a monstrous yew tree that demands stories — three lies, and then the truth. But to treat the novel as only a plot is to miss its true achievement: Ness turns a parable about mourning into a formal experiment in how stories both conceal and disclose the interior life of pain.

Stylistically the book is deceptively simple. Ness’s prose moves in short, hard strokes; sentences are lean, sentences repeat, and silence is deployed as deliberately as speech. That economy of diction does two things at once. It mirrors the way trauma collapses thought into single, overriding sensations, and it makes room for the more mythic register the monster brings: long, conversational parables that sit against Conor’s clipped inner voice like a wind against a shutter. This contrapuntal texture — spare human narration versus grand, ambiguous fable — is the engine of the book’s emotional power.

Formally, the triadic structure (three tales + a final demand for truth) is an old one, and Ness uses it not to reassure but to disorient. The stories the monster tells are not simple moral exempla; they are stories in which culpability is diffuse, justice is messy, and the boundary between victim and perpetrator blurs. By refusing tidy resolution, those tales force both Conor and the reader to hold complexity. The “truth” the novel insists upon is not a courtroom verdict but the recognition that grief contains shame, resentment, and an ache for violence as much as sorrow. The monstrous — in form and symbol — is therefore not simply a therapeutic device but an ethical probe: what will you admit about yourself if admission is required for healing?

Ness’s conception of the monster is especially suggestive. The monster is never simply a fairy-tale helper or a therapist in disguise. It speaks with a voice that is at once ancient and intimate, mythic in diction and practical in demand. It refuses easy consolations; its stories teach by rupture rather than by gentle lesson. This ambivalence makes the monster a figure of ambiguous origin — a personification of the yew’s long life, of a cultural archive of parable, of Conor’s own unbearable interiority — and that ambiguity is precisely the point. The novel asks the reader to tolerate indeterminacy: is the monster real? Does it matter? The answer it gives is that the psychic reality matters more than ontological proof.

Conor himself is wrought with particularity. He is sometimes brittle, often ashamed, and intermittently violent in thought; Ness never sentimentalizes his anger. The domestic world around him — a caring but exasperated grandmother, a distant father, a mother who is both present and receding — anchors the narrative in recognizably modern family dynamics while allowing the book to speak to larger, almost archetypal experiences of loss. Importantly, adults in the story are not flat foils but partial occupants of their own limitations; the novel refuses the cliché of adults as either omniscient saviours or grotesque villains. That refusal lends credibility to Conor’s solitude: he is not simply abandoned, he is alone in a way only grief can manufacture.

Visually the book is often published with striking illustrations, and the interplay between text and image is not decorative but interpretive. Stark, expressionistic images — shadows, ink-smeared faces, the monstrous silhouette of the yew — amplify the novel’s tonal range, adding a palpably tactile layer to the prose. The imagery sometimes acts as the unsaid of the text, catching what language will not: the physicality of a boy’s clenched hands, the torque of a throat that cannot speak. The book thus stages a subtle dialogue between what can be told and what can only be shown.

What makes A Monster Calls remarkable in the landscape of contemporary children’s and young-adult literature is its moral seriousness without didacticism. Ness treats his audience — young readers and adults alike — with respect: he presents difficult ethical and affective material without flattening it into lesson-story simplicity. The novel’s last movements, in which confession and consequence converge, feel earned rather than contrived. The resolution is not a tidy cure but an act of recognition: grief demands a truth be named, however ugly, if the mourner is to continue.

If there is a limitation, it may be that the book’s mythic, parabolic mode can at moments distance readers who prefer psychological realism over allegory. Some may find the monster’s rhetorical grandeur at odds with the contemporary domestic material. But this tension is not a flaw so much as an effect: Ness is deliberately unsettling the reader’s expectations about genre and about the uses of narrative itself.

Ultimately, A Monster Calls succeeds because it trusts story as both weapon and balm. It asks the reader to sit in a place of discomfort and to recognize that recovery is not forgetting but the honest admission of what we would rather hide. This is a book that insists stories are not only ways to explain the world but ways to enact moral and emotional truth. It is short, but it lingers. For anyone who wants a children’s novel that treats sorrow with intellectual rigour and imaginative daring, A Monster Calls is essential reading.