The Knife of Never Letting Go

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I have a habit of picking up books whose title or author I recognize.  I suppose everyone does, but often times these are books or authors I'm not familiar with, but have heard about enough (or heard about once in a memorable enough way) that they've stuck with me in a a way all the others haven't.  Patrick Ness and this book in particular was a combination of the two, I've seen lots of reviews for A Monster Calling but I didn't put author and book together until I went to add the rest of the Chaos Walking series to my GoodReads.  What stuck out in my mind up until that point was a book haul nerdintranslation had done where she talked about picking up the first two books in the series despite the fact she didn't read much YA.  Assertions like that are the things that interest me about books.  What is it that makes one book more compelling than another?  What is it that draws people to them?  I'll (attempt to) read anything once to try and figure that out.
The Knife of Never Letting Go is a future dystopian set on a planet named New World.  At it's heart it's about people's relationships with themselves, with other people, with the world as a whole, but one of the things that I loved about this book is that it's an adventure story.  Ness builds this beautiful world and then weaves together an adventure and all the feels without seeming either over the top or unrealistic.  There's some obvious moral messages in the book like there are in most dystopians, but they're not forced upon the reader or directly touched on in a way that draws away from the story.

The main character Todd, is allowed his journey of self-discover in the traditional sense, while he flees some very real dangers from his hometown. Here's a quick rundown for those of you not familiar with the book.  Todd Hewett's just a boy, soon to be a man according to town custom, which doesn't seem like that much of an unusual thing except for he's the last boy in a town of 146 men.  Prentisstown, where he lives, has no women, just 146 men and one boy.  Prentisstown also has "Noise" which is what it sounds like, lots and lots of noise all coming from inside other people's heads.  In Prentisstown, everyone can hear what everyone else is thinking and, perhaps my favorite part, animals can talk.  So what does a boy do with all this Noise?  He finds a spot of silence in the swamp.  Silence is supposed to be impossible, but it's not and as it turns out, knowing this is dangerous.  Todd, the last boy in Prentisstown, finds silence and gets himself in a bit of trouble, and by  a bit I mean a lot.


The adventure Todd undertakes in this book takes up the majority of story, but perhaps my favorite part is the beginning.  Ness does a wonderful job of describing the world that Todd lives in: the town, the talking sheep, the farm.  Yes I loved the talking sheep and the farm, is anyone really surprised?  In the rest of the narrative, my favorite bit was the relationship between Todd and the concept of silence, this overwhelming unreadable thing, or absence of a thing in Todd's case.  It really opens up a new way of looking at human relationships that I liked.

I also really enjoyed the pacing of the book.  It's been a really long time since I've read anything that's done such a good job of scattering such heartfelt emotional moments in with the danger and other adventurous things.  There was never a dull moment, but there also wasn't a moment where I wasn't feeling for or intrigued by one of the characters.  Part of latter is due to the personable style in which Ness' narration spills forth from Todd.  It's a boy/almost man's perspective full of conflict and fumbled spellings.  The spelling particularly in the beginning grated a bit on me.  My brain kept insisting that 'attenshun' wasn't a word even if Todd insisted it was.  After awhile though, the spelling melted into the rest of the story and became another of Todd's quirks, another way of him expressing himself.

As for things I didn't like about the book, would it ending too soon count?  I did like the ending though.  I like that the journey, as it started at the beginning of the book, was completed- those lose ends were tied up, but the story continues, quite compellingly, into the second book.  There's enough mystery there that I'm itching to get my hands on the second book without it being overdone.

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