Summary

What if you aren’t the Chosen One? The one who’s supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?

What if you’re like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again.

Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week’s end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.

Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions.

Award-winning writer Patrick Ness’s bold and irreverent novel powerfully reminds us that there are many different types of remarkable. 

–Goodreads

What I Thought

I want to start by saying, I have heard really good things about this book. So many people absolutely adore this book. In fact, the high praise involving this book was one of the biggest reasons I even bought it. I’ll be honest and say that I really had very little knowledge of what this book was about when I purchased it, but I saw it at Target, on sale, and signed by the author, that, on top of all the praise it had gotten, was enough for me! Actually reading the book though, I was a little underwhelmed.  I did not dislike The Rest of Us Just Live Here, I just did not love it like I wanted to. 

Something I really did enjoy in this book were the Indie Kids.  Indie Kids are the characters who would be the main protagonist in any typical YA novel. I loved the way they were portrayed, and I actually thought it was really funny!  I really liked that at the beginning of each chapter, you were given a glimpse as to what was going on in the Indie Kids’ lives. This book really shows us what is going on in the lives of everybody else, while the hero (aka the Indie Kid) is out saving the world again. 

I also appreciated the way mental illness was portrayed. The main character, Mikey, has OCD, and his sister also is recovering from an eating disorder.  I felt it was a very honest portrayal of these mental illnesses, and it was very interesting to to read about what it is like to experience them. 

I also enjoyed the various friendships, family, and romantic relationships.  They were all very realistic, and I really liked that. 

Honestly, this book wasn’t bad, but I just found it a bit…boring at times. I get that the characters were supposed to just be living their life like an average high schooler, but let’s be real, that’s boring sometimes. Aside from the ending, there was just a little too much everyday life in this book.  Maybe if  I was in high school still, I would have found it more exciting and relatable, but I’m not. So, it just ended up feeling uneventful a lot of them time, for me anyway. Like I said though, I’ve heard many great things about this book, so maybe it just wasn’t the one for me!

Overall, this book features a very unique storyline with good characters. It was just a bit boring for me at times.