After drowning in the ocean, 17-year-old Seth wakes up in a desolate suburban English town and thinks he died and went straight to hell. Seth does his best to adjust and find out why this place looks so familiar to him and he remembers that this is the neighbourhood he grew up in until his family moved to the States after something tragic happened to his brother. Soon Seth learns that he is not alone in this place and that this is not hell, but something far more complex.
Written by the author of The Monsters Call and Chaos Walking, Patrick Ness, More Than This takes you on a self-exploring trip in which you are asked, if you could change something traumatic, would you?
Real life can be hard and unpleasant and sometimes everyone one of us wishes to stop time or rewind time to choose differently or erase something from happening. Ness explores this need of change. Seth drowns and wakes up in an empty house in which he lived with his family as a kid. He died in the USA and wakes up in England. That alone is strange, so of course he thinks he died and will be punished in hell for eternity. When he meets Regine and Tomasz, he finds out that this is not hell and that he is not dead, he just woke up after living in a virtual world for the past couple of years.
Lethe, an organisation who created a virtual reality, can upload your life into the program and let you live in an alternate reality in which you can overwrite bad events and live up to your full potential. The thing is, the moment you are linked to the framework, you forget that you are. So, while you live your life in a fake world, your real body lies wrapped up and plugged with tubes in a coffin to keep you alive. Torn between the life he lived and his new reality, Seth tries to understand everything and find his family, while also running away from the mysterious person called The Driver whose only goal is to catch everyone who escape from the framework.
For me, More Than This is a mix of The Lovely Bones and Lost River, with a bit of Ready Player One and a lot of The Matrix.
Nowadays we have the possibility to escape reality through the different platforms on the internet, whilst knowing that at some point we have to face reality again. Ness explores the possibility of a constant way of escape while also showing that no matter what you are doing, in the end you never will be able to. You just change the setting, but you are still human, and humans make mistakes.
At first, the framework feels perfect, but even there, Seth and his family had to face unpleasant things and their lives have been far from perfect. Their stories have been programmed to be happy and together, while you can feel that something is not right but neither the characters nor the reader can pinpoint what.
It is not possible to talk about this book and not spoil the most important parts of the story, without giving too much away. There are two plot twists which you do not see coming and take the book in another direction.
But what I can tell you is that More Than This teaches you that you’ll never truly escape your life and that you have to learn to deal with it the way it is and that in this, you can find something beautiful.
More Than This is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
A boy drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments. He dies. Then he wakes, naked and bruised and thirsty, but alive. How can this be? And what is this strange deserted place?
As he struggles to understand what is happening, the boy dares to hope. Might this not be the end? Might there be more to this life, or perhaps this afterlife?
From multi-award-winning Patrick Ness comes one of the most provocative and moving novels of our time.
