this book treated me like a dog treats a ragdoll. 
 and i have no idea where to begin. 
 patrick ness has written a game-changer that i'm not even really sure how to approach. 
 this is a YA novel. i've lost half of you book snobs right there. but i think that is my point. YA has been breaking free of its presumed confines for years. when i was a teen, YA novels were largely disposable, empty-calorie entertainment trifles meant to keep us off the streets, off drugs, and not full of babies. they were either morally-didactic or cheesy horror-mysteries with very little intellectual fiber. and when i finally came around on the contemporary YA fiction bandwagon, i was impressed with both the variety of topics and treatment of those topics and most importantly, the range of sophistication of the writing itself. sure, loads of them are still silly and forgettable, but there are also complete gems of books out there for stronger, smarter teen readers looking to be exposed to something new, something challenging. 
 and this book delivers that with a brainpunch i'm still feeling. 
 this is how i felt after i read beauty queens, after i read piper's son,which while they are COMPLETELY different kinds of books, did things to me that i didn't think could still be done to me, not in YA anyway. which sounds like i am undermining what i just sad about YA-sophistication, but my reaction to these titles is more about my being completely knocked off-balance as a reader, and at having my expectations about the book completely rocked, but also my expectations about what books could be. 
 does that make sense? because it's not that i am impressed that there are well written YA books out there - i'm beyond that realization. this is something more fundamentally mind-blowing. 
 i promise there is a review coming, but i really gotta work through this here. i'm all gobsmacked. 
 beauty queens stunned me by not being, as i had expected, about a bunch of lovely and spoiled girls going all lord of the flies and killing each other on a deserted island after a plane crash. in fact, it was the complete opposite of that storyline, which forced me to question what that said about me that i wanted that story in the first place, and brought a little tear to my soul and stirred up all the sisterhood feelings all bottled up in me. piper's son redefined the boundaries of YA commercially by having one of the two main characters be a fifty-something woman experiencing her first pregnancy. and it redefined the boundaries for me personally because it made me cry. and that doesn't happen. 
 and this one. this one just takes genre and convention and coyly toys with it. when you think you know what is going on, when the characters think they know what is gong on, that's when things start to go all slipstream on you. 
 more than this is like a giant book-jenga, with different kinds of books making up its tower, and just when you think you know what you are reading, that darn patrick ness will change the game slightly, yanking out a piece of the puzzle, slyly addressing what he is doing and what he is not doing and what he could be doing and letting the reader know that he knows what they are thinking, but think again, please! it is an aftermath novel. it is an afterlife novel. it is an afterlove novel. it is an afterloss novel. 
 he pulls and teases and backtracks and sidetracks in this elegant dance of misdirection and metafiction. 
 and then he does the unthinkable! and it's hard to even tiptoe around, and it may not count as spoiler but basically - (view spoiler)[nothing you think as a reader matters. the story itself does not matter. it's all just perception and opinion and "Oh, forget it," he says with feeling. "Nobody knows anything." (hide spoiler)]AND THAT IS ULTIMATE MINDFUNKERY!! and it becomes this crazytime philosophical and humanist exercise, but like if solipsistic humanism was a thing, you know? it blows my freaking mind with all my brainparts that still cannot comprehend that this is a freaking YA book. 
 also - tomasz is the new manchee. and i love him. 
 i can't do anything for this book. it's too much in my heart right now.