2023/171: Release — Patrick Ness

The boy takes a breath. “Today was a day I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Like everything that was tying me down suddenly got untied.”
“And I the same,” the spirit says. “Today is the day my destiny changed.”
“So did mine.”
“I know,” the spirit says. “I heard it coming. I followed the longing for it.” [p. 275]

Over the course of Saturday in a small town somewhere in Washington State, a gay teenager's life is transformed. Also, the world -- possibly the universe -- is saved.

Adam is seventeen; still half in love with his ex, Enzo; maybe half in love with his current boyfriend, Linus; doing his best to obey his evangelical parents; reliant on his friendship with Angie. Saturday morning starts with errands for his mother, and Saturday night he plans to attend Enzo's going-away party. Between those two events Adam finds himself questioning the limits and certainties of his world, and unwittingly saving the world. For on the other side of town, the ghost of a murdered girl is rising from the lake, and somehow she's entwined with the Queen of another realm. The spirit sends the Queen on a mission of vengeance, accompanied by a seven-foot-tall faun who's unable to warn her of the dangers...

I loved this. Ness wraps together the two stories -- the primary narrative of Adam's Saturday, and the secondary (and perhaps more significant) story of the Queen, the ghost and the faun -- with care and restraint, leaving the reader to make the connections between the two. Adam's interactions with his family and friends are so vivid, especially the pivotal conversation with his father. ("It hurts my heart that you're afraid"). His gradual realisation that he's freer than he thought he was, that his world is opening up, is something I wish I'd read as a teenager, feeling doomed by very different constraints. While the story of the Queen and the spirit and the faun seems at first lighter and more predictable -- though told in a more poetic, mythic style -- it's a different sort of delight. The faun, in particular, is fascinating: "He wonders if she will win this time. And if she doesn’t, will he have time to eat anyone before the worlds disintegrate?"

I'm about to reread The Rest of Us Just Live Here for a book club discussion, and I'll be thinking about Release and comparing the ways in which the fantastical intrudes on the mundane, and how irrelevant it is or isn't.

Fulfils the ‘doesn't fit any of the other prompts’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. I mean, it probably could be shoehorned into several of the categories, but there isn't room because they're all fulfilled.