Mongrels

Mongrels is a more challenging book than I expected. Much like its characters - an unconventional family of migrant werewolves - it bucks rules and devices that one would typically come to expect in a novel. And yet, by the end I was, to my surprise, really satisfied. The ending stayed with me, occupied my mind after I put it down. I'm not sure how that makes me feel about the novel as a whole though.

I'm in the process of revising a novel - or figuring out how to revise a novel that I've already revised four or five times, and now I'm starting to wonder if I've just outgrown it - and as such I'm absorbing tons of storytelling advice. How to introduce conflict, how to administer background information, how to build your character. This book does its damnedest to defy every single one of those rules. We flash back and forth between past and present constantly, between someone telling a yarn and someone giving you vital information, all while you're trying to parse through the doublespeak of werewolves attempting to pass through the world unnoticed while refusing to conform to anything resembling a normal life. There isn't an ordinary trajectory - aside from the narrator's ongoing question of whether he is truly or werewolf or not, there isn't a central conflict. The conflict is survival, its constantly learning, its trying to scrape by day after day and wondering whether its better to stay human or go wolf.

I'm not going to tell you that all those strange pieces come together, because they don't, not exactly. But Jones does know how to end a book, and you get an answer not only to the question you were asking, but maybe a good reason for it took the journey it did in order to get there. Nothing is handed to you though. I'm not going to lie, I struggled to stay engaged through a lot of this book, and it wasn't until those last 80 pages or so that I got into it. But I liked that ending a lot, and I liked the feeling it left me with, even though the rest of the book left me feeling kind of icky and sad. This is one of those 3.5 star books that I have a hard time defining (funny how I never want ask for a 4.5 or a 2.5, its always the tricky point between “liked it” and “really liked it” that gets me stuck). I think is extremely effective for what's its trying to do, but not as entertaining of a read as I would have liked.