The book is adventurous, complex, intense, incredibly good, and a little confusing. The author, Patrick Ness, does a phenomenal job of leaving out key information so that you have to keep reading to have a better understanding. The characters are clear and unique. I will definitely continue to read and finish the book.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The Knife of Never Letting Go
This book was one of the books Ms. Post recommended to read over spring break, and my mom was brought it along with her on our trip, so we switched off reading it. Readers have told me "if you liked The Hunger Games then you have to read this." I'm 290 pages into the book and it is a little similar to The Hunger Games in the sense that it is a futuristic science fiction book and it is about adventurous, brave kids in a messed up world. The main character is a boy around the age of twelve named Todd. Todd is the last boy (13 is the age of becoming a man) in Prentisstown. Everybody in the town can hear each others thoughts because of aliens called spackle, who supposedly put a spell on the men of Prentisstown in a horrible war. Todd was told by the Prentisstown men that none of the women survived the spell. One month before he became a man, Todd was hiking around with his dog named Manchee, who can also talk, and he came upon complete silence. Two men in the town named Ben and Cillian, who had raised him, were all of a sudden desperate to get him out of the town. There are many dark secrets Todd didn't know about the town he was born in. Todd makes it out of Prentisstown with Manchee and there he meets the first girl he's ever seen; Viola. Viola is from planet Earth and her job is to send a signal to a spaceship full of thousands of humans stating whether or not it's safe to land. She has to warn them that it's dangerous but there's no way to signal them. The two journey together to find Todd a safe place to live and to find a way for Viola to signal her spaceship. They soon find out that an army of Prentisstown men are after them. Throughout their escape, they grow closer.
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I recently finished The Knife Of Never Letting Go. I thought it was intense and almost downright boring for a long time. One thing that bothered me personally was the misspelling of a lot of words such as "direkshun" even though I understood it was a technique to evoke empathy for Todd and the innocent, uneducated boys of Prentisstown. I agree Patrick Ness does a very good job of keeping the plot hidden, intense, and transport the reader into the world of Todd. I hope that in the next book of the same series, Ness will work on drawing the reader in the novel earlier.
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