“A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness, Illustrated by Jim Kay

The cover art and illustrations in “A Monster Calls” evoke the grief and inner turmoil of a 13-year-old boy whose mother is dying of cancer.
Credit: Amazon.com

“A Monster Calls” was an award-winning young adult novel before it was a movie based on the book. Written by Patrick Ness and illustrated by Jim Kay, the book grew from an original idea by author Siobhan Dowd, who died before being able to complete the book herself. It’s the story of Conor, a 13-year-old boy in a small town in England. His mother is sick with an unnamed illness, but we recognize it as cancer: The treatments make her throw up and her hair has fallen out. Conor makes his own breakfast and packs his own lunch for school because she no longer has the strength to do those things for him. Conor’s mum, as the book calls her, has been sick for a long time, and now the treatments aren’t working.

Everyone in the story — Conor, his mum, his grandma who doesn’t fit comfortably into his life, his dad who moved to the U.S. after the divorce — everyone knows something is coming. But no one wants to name it. Some words are too hard to say.

So a monster visits Conor in his dreams. It takes the form of a yew tree roaring to life, uprooting itself from the nearby church cemetery on powerful legs. It tears through the walls of Conor’s bedroom, calling in fierce gusts of earthy wind: “I have come to get you, Conor O’Malley.” The monster grabs the boy in its tree-branch hands night after night, but it doesn’t want to tear him limb from limb. Instead, it wants something far more frightening, which is for Conor to tell it a story — a true story, and one story in particular. In one nightmare scene, the monster says this to Conor about his story as it holds him in its fist:

“You know that your truth, the one that you hide, Conor O’Malley, is the thing you are most afraid of.”

Conor stopped squirming.

It couldn’t mean —

There was no way it could mean —

There was no way it could know that.

Waking from this and other nightmares, Conor has to somehow navigate “normal” life, too: bullies, overdue school assignments, hurt friendships. Everyone at school knows his mum is sick. Everyone looks at him differently now, or they look away. It’s hard when we don’t know what to say. It’s harder still, terrifically harder, when we know what we want to say but do not dare say it.

Throughout the book, Jim Kay’s black-and-white illustrations swirl around the text, churning as Conor tries to hold everything in his head and not let the words out.

The person writing this book review is a writer who will always be fond of words on paper. I love and value the movie versions of stories, but I find that holding a book in my hands lets me linger where I need to. My own mother died when I was 7, not from cancer but suicide, and there were a lot of very difficult words no one said out loud to me. The adults in my life wanted me to know what happened but were afraid telling me would hurt me. It was years (decades, if I’m being honest) before they understood they could tell me about my mom’s life, illness and death and trust that I wanted to know and that I believed knowing was worth the hurt. So as I read “A Monsters Calls,” I found myself rereading lines like these, where Conor’s mum tells him the latest cancer treatment isn’t working, but she does not tell him that she’s dying:

“This latest treatment’s not doing what it’s supposed to,” she said. “All that means is they’re going to have to adjust it, try something else.”

“Is that it?” Conor asked.

She nodded. “That’s it. There’s lots more they can do. It’s normal. Don’t worry.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because,” and here Conor stopped for a second and looked down at the floor. “Because you could tell me, you know.”

“A Monster Calls” does not say the words cancer, dying or death.  Instead, the pages say these words over and over: kindness, believing, lies, selfishness, punishment, healing, good and bad, stories, truth.

Siobhan Dowd, whose idea sparked “A Monster Calls,” knew what those words meant. Dowd was a lifelong activist for writing, reading and freedom of speech who began writing award-winning novels for young people. But she died from breast cancer before she could write everything she wanted to, and at the time of her death in 2007, “A Monster Calls” was a concept, a family of characters, and opening pages. Dowd wanted her publisher to find an author to do the rest of the writing for her. The publisher reached out to Patrick Ness, and Ness agreed to write the story.

Patrick Ness agreed to take on writing the book “A Monster Calls” after author Siobhan Dowd died of breast cancer before she could finish it.

This book was written for young adults, but it’s for all of us. If you’re reading this book review, you’ve lived long enough to have loved and grieved. You’ve probably wrestled with desperately wanting to both know and not know. You’ve shared the human experience of being overwhelmed both by wanting to say it and wanting never ever to have to say those words out loud.

The book “A Monster Calls” does not pull its punches. It tells the truth that yes, living means dying and loving people means you may lose them. As Conor’s father says, “Stories don’t always have happy endings.” But this book reassures us that telling our stories to each other in books, movies and other media — and saying those hardest words out loud — can help us heal.