I am disappointed. Perhaps this is my own fault, due to unrealistic ideas and hardly any research. Or perhaps I can blame it on the inconsistency within the book, the sudden shift in themes and plot about halfway through. All I know is that I started one book and ended another. It wasn't coherent enough. It didn't move in the direction that I wanted it to. 
 "Here is the boy, drowning." 
 Thus begins "More Than This" by Patrick Ness. The first opening chapter is a death scene, violently claustrophobic, silently killing the main character deep under the glistening water surface. Ness writes simple sentences filled with dread. Angst. Loss and death. The boy, the main character, drowns and so the story begins. 
 This is quite a different way to start a book and I was immediately drawn in. I read on and on, in the noisy morning train, and I concentrated on this poor and dead boy, Seth, who drowned and woke up in an empty world, reliving his distant and repressed childhood-memories. 
 In the first part of Ness' novel almost nothing happens. Everything is still. Seth is caught in a world he doesn't understand and he is alone. Basically he wanders around while he tries to remember and tries to forget the events that have brought him there. 
 When I read those first hundredandfifty pages, I was spellbound by Ness' writing. I thought I was reading a very clever and deeply melancholic tale of identity, remembrance and selfdiscovery. But as it turns out, I wasn't. I was reading something entirely different. 
 I was in fact reading a science-fiction novel in the style of The Matrix. 
 And I didn't see it coming. 
 "Are you serious? Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you've got to do is find a way to live there." 
 For me, this beautiful tale of a drowning boy and his revelations suddenly crumbled. It twisted itself into a sad cliche, a mere shadow of what I had expected it to become. I didn't find anything remarkable in the last part of the book. But then again, I have never been a fan of The Matrix. (Somehow I always fall asleep whenever my boyfriend forces me to watch it. It's not really my thing). 
 However Ness does have a beautiful point with everything he writes. The lesson he teaches is an important one, I just don't like how it's told. Perhaps I was fooled by my own expectations. Nevertheless, I am disappointed.