Title: Release
Author: Patrick Ness
Publication date: 2017
Date started: 09/02/2019
Date finished: 15/02/2019
First sentence: “Adam would have to get the flowers himself”
Last sentence: “‘My Queen,’ he says. For there she is.”
Favorite sentence: “Here’s the thing, Adam. I know what I want. Not all of it, but the right amount. I want you, but not at any price. I want to get through my senior year with friends and I want you to be one of them and I want you lying in my bed and I want you naked in my shower and I want us to laugh and I want you to actually be there. All of you. Not seventy per cent with the rest still wondering if Enzo is ever going to come back after burrowing so far into the closet it’s like he’s looking for straight Narnia.”
Summary (spoilers): We follow two stories in this book, which both take place on the same day. The first one is Adam’s, who has a very intense day. After some shopping and a long run, he meets his brother who announces that he got a girl pregnant, then his manager at work tells him he will be fired unless he has sex with him; he goes back to his best friend Angela for comfort, but she tells him that she’s leaving for Europe in one week. He then goes to Linus, his boyfriend, but has a breakdown while they’re having sex, and when he goes to help his Pastor father at church later, he comes out to him quite violently after his father insinuated that he led his manager on. Adam, his boyfriend and his best friend go to Enzo’s farewell party later in the evening. Enzo was Adam’s first boyfriend but he broke his heart and Adam never made his peace with it… but tonight, maybe he will. The other side of the story is about Katie, a girl who was recently murdered, and whose spirit is now intertwined with the Queen’s. They take revenge on Katie’s murderer and it looks like the world is very close to collapsing – which will happen if Katie and the Queen don’t manage to separate before the sunset – but Adam offers Katie a rose which allows them to split.
Opinion: I regularly pick books on the LGBTQ shelf of my local library without knowing anything about them, and I have to admit that this one was a bit of a disappointment. I had a lot of trouble getting in the story (did I ever, really?), and even when I ended up mildly interested in Adam’s story, the ghost chapters were always there to interrupt it and I lost all interest. Because this book is cut in 2: the intense day of a closeted gay kid, and the mystical journey of a murdered girl and a… Queen? Adam’s story is vaguely interesting, but the ghost and Queen story is very strange and we go way past the middle of the book before we start to understand it even slightly. Well, at least it was easy to read so I didn’t have to abandon it halfway.
Loke Reads 