A Monster Calls

I'm not sure if this happened with anyone else, but the premise of this book intrigued me more than any of the others. I've always been into the whole dark/creepy/weird/sad vibe, and this book exemplifies all of those adjectives. I'm sure everyone knows the premise by now, so I'll spare the brief summary.

This book has a few central ideas, the most obvious being something along the lines of "life isn't always black and white, you've got to take the good with the bad, and accept the hardships along the way." There are more eloquent ways to put that, I'm sure, but that should cover it for our purposes. Anyway, I think this is a really valuable lesson, especially for adolescent students. At times, it seems like adults or the world itself ignore the easiest and most desirable outcomes for terrible reasons. For Conor, he just wants things to go back to the way they were before his mother was diagnosed with Cancer. Unfortunately for him, that is not the way the world works.

What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that I really think this book would have some value in a classroom. I think the premise of a monster coming in the middle of the night is enough to grab students who might otherwise be turned off at the mention of a death/cancer story. Certainly, this book is heavy, there's no getting around that, but it's more than that.

Another nice aspect of this book is the illustrations. They add so much to the story and the overall mood/ambience you feel as a reader while you progress through the story. For these reasons, I think this book would be a great piece to work with in any language arts class of adolescent students.