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Reviews for The Knife of Never Letting Go

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  • Review of The Knife of Never Letting Go5

    Lydia Presley My first thought when I put this book down was...

    Are you kidding me?!

    I now understand why one book blogger states that she is an "evangelist" for this book. This book, this.. amazing book, it had me in tears, it had me choked up, it had me laughing, it had me angry and it had me completely tied around it's figurative finger.

    The Knife of Never Letting Go is one seriously intense book - do not pick it up until you have the time ready, because you will not want to put it down until you've turned the last page. And even then - you'll be wishing you did the smart thing and had the next book ready.

    There is so much I love about this book. I loved Todd, his innocence, his struggle and his instinct for survival and protection in a world that did not foster one of those feelings. I loved Viola's intelligence and her empathy for Todd and for others. I loved how human she is, how, in spite of all the odds against her she still takes the time to grieve and to feel for her own losses but never lets it get in the way of what needs to be done.

    And then there's Manchee. Manchee is Todd's dog, the dog he never wanted - and much like the famous dog of Disney fame, Manchee thinks a dog's joyous, loyal thoughts. Everything from Squirrel! to Ow, Todd? (the question mark killed me - it's so .. doggie), Manchee endears himself to the reader and .. man, I can't talk about him without crying. What kind of book does this to a reader?!

    Most of all though, this book goes to show just how powerful writing in the first person can be. Because not only do we hear Todd's thoughts, but so does everyone else. The others surrounding him hear what we think is narrative, but it's really Todd's thoughts. We hear words how he says them, we hear his lack of education, we are there in his mind, dealing with the fear and the confusion and the never-ending run from everything that is evil.

    This is a book I'll be recommending eagerly to every teenager in my life. Fantastic story, great characters and a style of writing I can only stand in awe of. Well done, Patrick Ness, well done. by Lydia Presley

  • Top review

    Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com4

    TeensReadToo On a far-flung world newly settled by humanity, twelve-year-old Todd Hewitt of Prentisstown is a boy on the brink of becoming a man.

    When settlers came to this world, they found it already inhabited by aliens known as the Spackle, and a war was waged against them to colonize the planet. Now, almost twenty years after the first settlers landed, the world is low-tech but free of the "spacks." However, they left behind them the "Noise germ," a chemical contaminant that causes all the men who come in contact with it to broadcast their thoughts for everyone's hearing--and kills all the infected women.

    On the eve of his thirteenth birthday, Todd has never seen a woman. He was the last child born in the settlement before his mother succumbed to the Noise germ and died, and now he's the only boy left in the village of Prentisstown, all the others having turned thirteen and been proclaimed men. Now, with Todd's birthday approaching, the entire town is anxious, and Todd can hear it.

    The men of the town are keeping something from him; although they can hear each other think, it's possible to learn techniques that allow one to control the information that others can hear. Ben and Cillian, his adoptive guardians and old friends of his parents, are both worried for him, though Todd doesn't know why.

    And then, with less than a month to go until Todd's thirteenth birthday, he stumbles across a secret that no boy is meant to know and all men have been forced to forget, a secret about the history of his world and the lies he's been told. Todd has no choice but to escape from the town he's called his home and the people who have been his parents, on the run from something more terrible than the alien Spackle, and more familiar.

    The sheer intensity of the story Ness tells kept me reading straight through this book, despite its length and occasionally hefty prose. Todd's first-person, present-tense narration has an inexorable pull that places the reader within the context of the story and keeps you turning the pages. The plot is full of twists and turns, the world is immaculately and innovatively crafted, and the characters' pain and longing seeps from the pages.

    My largest complaint with this book was the way in which it ended, without resolving some major issues that had been significant throughout the story. It is the first book in a series, so this sense of incompleteness may be slightly forgiven, but I felt like I'd spent the entire book hurtling forward into empty space only to be slammed at the last minute against a brick wall.

    That said, I'd recommend THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO to anyone who enjoys dystopia or slightly darker fiction, and I know I can't wait to see what happens next! by TeensReadToo

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