Fantastic!
The Rest of Us Just Live Here, by Patrick Ness, is an exploration of the lives of the non-chosen ones in a supernatural world. The world includes soul-eating ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural phenomena that consistently attack their town, and the indie kids are the chosen ones who must defeat these threats. This story is not about the indie kids. The beginning of each chapter summarizes the major paranormal threats taking place and what the indie kids - the chosen ones - are doing, how they are trying to defeat these threats, and the impossible things they must accomplish. Then the focus of the story shifts to the characters in the background - “the rest of us” who “just live here.” Because this story is not about the chosen ones, it is atypical in the fantasy genre. Most fantasy stories follow the hero of their world, waiting to find out how their hero will defeat the big bad and accomplish the impossible quest. This novel stands the typical fantasy tropes on their heads, instead following the characters in the background, watching how they manage to survive in a world hell-bent on trying to kill them. Most of these characters are without supernatural abilities; they’re regular high-schoolers just trying to make it through the day while somebody else is saving the world. That’s kind of what I like about this story. It shows realistic reactions to unreal situations, like how you or I would react to being in a supernatural world without having any superpowers. Though this book is atypical in the fantasy genre, it falls well within the parameters of what makes fantasy fiction. It’s a supernatural world that must follow its own rules, and everything that happens has to make sense. It contains heroes, the “chosen ones” who must defeat paranormal threats, but it also allows readers to suspend their disbelief by grounding itself in what seems at first glance to be the real world, albeit with supernatural elements. An example of this is that the main character’s mother is a politician trying to win an election. The characters face real-world problems, like dealing with an alcoholic father, managing anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and the social and emotional struggles associated with being gay. All this occurs in the background of a plethora of supernatural events that threaten the characters’ very existence, and because they’re not the chosen ones, all they can do is try to cope in the best way they can.