Audiobook Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

 

• Release Date: October 6th 2015

• Length: 6 hours and 23 minutes
• Genre: Contemporary / Paranormal YA

• Publisher: HarperTeen

17-year-old Mikey Mitchell just wants to enjoy his last few months of high school with his best friends and hopefully getting his OCD under control.  But he’s also kind of stuck in the middle of your favorite paranormal YA novel, except you know. . . he’s a background character.  Strange blue lights and mysterious deaths  means the indie kids–those high school kids with the capital D destinies and weird names–are up to something. Mikey just hopes the indie kids don’t  blown up up the high school….again.

Patrick Ness is a mix bag of an author, you just never know what you’re going to get. The concept of having a Mikey’s contemporary narrative  adjacent to the indie kid’s paranormal adventure made for an entertaining listen.  The indie kid’s plot is a parody of e those paranormal YA books of the early 2010’s and Ness creates a loving satire of the genre.

Can we talk about James Fouhey, the audiobook narrator ? James Fouhey is official on my auto-buy list. His voice was perfect for the narration of Mikey, he has these great tonal shifts and at times it didn’t even sound like he was reading a text. He also seems to read fast, this book is 336 pages and the audio is only 6 hours long.

An irreverent, offbeat YA coming of age story about immortals, gods and vampires but mostly about what it means to be the rest of us.

Mikey’s crush in this book is a half black, half Finnish girl named Henna Silvennnoinen and I thought that Finnish part was such a specific ethnicity you don’t see in YA. Well, it turns out that Henna Silvennoinen is a real woman–she won to have her name in the book from an auction when Ness was raising money for the typhoon in the Philippines. The name of Mikey’s best friend, Jared Shruin also came from this auction. That must be awesome !