There are authors who achieve a special symbiosis between children's and adult literature. Reading them is magical in that discovery of the child that we all are. It happened at the time with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his Little Prince or with Michael Ende and its Neverending Story, even. In this case the maker of this ambivalent literature is patrick ness.
Of course, to achieve this duality, beyond the dichotomy that growing up and leaving the child supposes to reach adulthood, the writer pulse must present us with a convincing story, a transversal transit through perennial emotions that always accompany us.
Likewise, resilience, that ability to emerge unscathed from the traumatic. Perhaps children can be able to better sublimate the painful facts of living...
Stories of strong emotions brought from the childhood in which we live, in order to achieve that fundamental empathy with feelings not yet adored by customs, morals and other burdens of maturity in the social environment. Patrick Ness, one of those authors capable of recovering our old voices, talks about all this. Books for all ages with double readings and a feeling of reconciliation with innocence.
Top 3 recommended novels by Patrick Ness
A monster comes to see me
The movie is wonderful. The visuals are great, no doubt. But the book has that something else, that going through the filters in search of your reading soul, where you are able to put your face on that of the child who advances between hardships and fantasies ...
Summary: The monster appeared just after midnight. But it wasn't the one Conor had been waiting for, the one from the nightmare he's been dreaming of every night since his mother started treatment. The one with the darkness and the wind and the scream… That monster in the garden is different. Ancient, wild.
And he wants something terrible and dangerous from Conor. He wants the truth. Costa Award winner Patrick Ness spins this story from an idea by Siobhan Dowd, who was unable to write it due to an untimely death from cancer. A gripping, exceptional and moving story about the difficulty in accepting the agony and death of our loved ones.
Knife in hand
Novel, for my taste, clearly adult that talks about being a child. A sometimes sinister but also enlightening fantasy about what it means to grow and adapt ... or not adapt.
Fear is one of those first atavistic sensations that accompany us as we leave the unconsciousness of paradise. At the bottom is death, growing up is dying a little, or succumbing to what you are expected to do in that unknown plan that is your destiny.
Summary: Imagine that you are the only boy in a town where there are only men. That you can hear everything they think. That they can hear everything you think. Imagine that you don't fit into his plans... Todd Hewitt is just a month away from the birthday that will make him a man.
But his city has been keeping secrets from him. Secrets that will make you run... This unflinching novel about fear, flight and the terrifying journey of self-discovery won both the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Teenage Booktrust Prize.
The rest of us are still here
Summer. Perhaps the time of year with the greatest loss of meaning over the years. In childhood, summer was an indefinite time of freedom, of dedication to friends and even to first loves.
What happened each summer was a parenthesis compared to what happened the rest of the year. And also in summer the fantasy had its space, as it happens in this story.
Summary: What if you are not the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight zombies, soul-eating ghosts, or whatever these blue lights and mysterious deaths turn out to be? What if you are like Mike?
He just wants to spend the summer with his friends, and maybe dare to ask Henna out before someone blows up high school. Again. Is it that if you are not going to save the world, your life cannot be special and interesting? Although perhaps not as much as that of your best friend, the God of Cats ...
