Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking) (bk. 1) (original 2008; edition 2008)

I'm having a hard time deciding how I feel about this book. I had some difficulty with the writing style - vernacular and full of misspellings meant to signify the voice of our back-country, illiterate narrator. Typically I don't care for that style much, but excepting the wildly misspelled words ("explorayshun" and other words that should have ended with "ation" always snagged me and pulled me out of the flow), it was tolerable.

Once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. I was solidly pulled in by the lure of all those secrets that our protagonist, Todd, needed to discover. I thought his character development was well-handled, especially regarding learning about Viola. It's hard to imagine what it must be like to truly have never met a female before, and I kept expecting the author to slip up and betray that perspective by allowing Tood to know or understand something he shouldn't, but that never happened.

So I loved the story for the most part, the slow revelation of the extent of Todd's ignorance and what all that might imply, but I had real trouble with the ending. Two-thirds the way through the book, I was suspecting I might give it a 5-star rating (I do that so rarely), but I'm so baffled by the end, I just can't do it.

SPOILERS

How did Aaron stay alive? This world seems to be solidly-based in science fiction, and though religious motivations are explained throughout, we're really never given a sense that the divine is active in the story until Aaron just won't/can't/doesn't die through the final battle. Todd and Viola's revelations about the meanings of life, death, and killing are really beautifully written, but also leave no clues to the existence of a divinity that is going to be involved in the story itself.

And I so badly wanted this story to be complete unto itself. I wanted Todd and Viola to have some sort of closure to their quest. Even knowing this is a trilogy, I had hoped for that. Having a straight-up cliffhanger as the conclusion of a novel is very unsatisfactory to me.

I'll read the next books, because I do want to know how the story ends, but I think I'll take a bit of a break first. For all the minor happy epiphanies we were given toward the end, there were so many things that went wrong and disappointments that I'm still not quite over it. (Yes, I'm a happy ending kind of girl. So it goes.) ( )

The main thing I gained from reading The Knife of Never Letting Go? Knowledge of how it feels to read a single, more than 400 page chase scene.

Sure, there are additional elements to this story. There is a coming of age tale since the protagonist Todd will become a man in a month’s time at the novel’s beginning. It’s a dystopia, complete with a deranged religious man, a tyrannical mayor, a gendered society, and a way of monitoring individuals’ thoughts through Noise, a virus that publicizes the thoughts of every male in the New World. We’ve got some light sci-fi going on: humanoid aliens inhabit the planet and Viola, the secondary protagonist, has crashed her spaceship onto New World. There’s even a minor mystery as Todd seeks to discover the true circumstances behind the disappearance of all women in Prentisstown and the reason why he is being hunted so feverishly after fleeing his town.

But despite all these components, The Knife of Never Letting Go boils down to one thing: a sprawling, epic chase scene. Which gets repetitive quickly. Very quickly.

Ness writes in first person from Todd’s perspective, but he cheats with his narrative technique. When Todd finds out crucial answers to the mystery of Prentisstown, they are not shared with the reader. Nearly halfway through this novel, I still had zero answers to the questions that had been introduced in chapter one. To me, this is plainly bad storytelling. I like when authors keep certain secrets and twists guarded, but they have to give me something. Don’t trick me into reading 90% of the book before revealing everything at once and then creating tons of new questions that, most likely, won’t be answered until 90% through the sequel.

My next biggest complaint concerned the prose, which is full of improper grammar and spelling to emphasize Todd’s lack of education. This technique can be employed splendidly (Lenny's voice in Steinbeck’s [b:Of Mice and Men|890|Of Mice and Men|John Steinbeck|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355358962s/890.jpg|40283] comes to mind), but with Todd, who is an annoying fourteen year old, it bothered me. It just sounded so juvenile. For example, Todd uses the term “effing” a lot and frequently follows it up by saying, “But I didn’t say effing, I said the actual word…” and you can almost see the freaking winky face behind it. Ha. Ha. At times, the writing reminded me more of verse than prose, since it was written with many short, fragmented sentences indented as individual lines. This style further weakened the writing by rendering it even more simplistic and immature.

A stronger point is the development of themes and motifs, especially through the eponymous “knife” and its role in killing. During this grandiose chase scene, Ness asks: does killing change you? does a person ever have the right to take another person’s life? These questions are compelling and relevant. 33 US states still offer death penalty as a sentence in cases of homicide. US soldiers go to war and daily kill individuals identified as threats. Is this okay? I love pondering over this philosophical question, but my god, in The Knife of Never Letting Go, I didn’t care that Todd was suffering from existential qualms about killing two of the main villains chasing after him. It was vexatious and repetitive. It’s one thing to read a nearly 500 page chase scene; it’s another to have the same two chasers turn up again and again to serve as some featherweight obstacle that Todd and Viola will undoubtedly overcome by maiming them nearly mortally to prevent any further pursuit yet OF COURSE the chasers will somehow reappear yet again. Instead of wondering about the rightness and nature of killing, all I could think after like the fifth reappearance of these chasers was “KILL THEM TODD, KILL THEM.” Put me out of my misery! There are also interesting parallels between the beliefs of some Prentisstown men and super hardcore evangelist Christian beliefs toward women, but this theme was mostly unexplored and lost in the muddle.

Basically, I didn’t really enjoy The Knife of Never Letting Go because the parts I found most interesting—the question of killing, the mysteries of the Noise, New World, and Prentisstown, the curious state of women in this society—were ignored in favor of action. If a fast-paced book focused on a wild pursuit of two kids by crazy men sounds like something you might enjoy, then certainly read this book. But if you like your books that feature dystopic secrets and a lot of walking to a destination to pack some emotional resonance (à la Cormac McCarthy’s [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg|3355573]), you may find this novel disappointing. ( )

I loved and hated this book at the same time. My favorite character was the dog Manchie- faithful until the end. :(
I thought that the concept of this book was very interesting. I have been reading a lot of books involving distopian societies and this one fit right in.
I'm excited to read the rest of the series! ( )

I have been seeing rave reviews for The Knife of Never Letting Go over the past year, and yet I was turned off from buying this book because of some of the quotes that I had seen in various reviews. The format of the Noise and the dialogue of the characters seemed too strange, and I wasn't sure it was something that would appeal to me.

However, you can't read that many raves without being just a little curious about why everyone loves a book so much. So when I had a gift certificate to a book store burning a hole in my pocket I decided to take a chance on The Knife of Never Letting Go. I have to say it is one of the best book purchases I have made this year. It is deserving of every single rave review that it has received.

The Noise that emanates from the male characters of the book contains every thought that they think, and those thoughts are sounded out loud for everyone in the vicinity to hear. Because of this it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to keep a secret, especially not a boy like Todd Hewitt. So when he finds something that he's not supposed to know about, he is less than successful at keeping it out of his conscious thoughts. Pretty soon he is running for his life, and the worst thing is that no one will tell him why, because if he knows then he will be in even more danger as others will read the information in his thoughts.

There are some books where an unusual dialogue format or usage of slang can detract from the overall effect of the book, but this was not one of them. The usage of another font for Noise (the audible sound of all of the men's thoughts) adequately conveys the overwhelming effect of the Noise on the population of Prentisstown. I will admit that it takes a little while to get used to the slang and Noise, but it works so well with the story that it is not a distraction, but rather enhances the plot.

It only took a chapter or two to rivet my attention to the story; after that I read the book straight through with very few breaks. The Knife of Never Letting Go is an intense and suspenseful read from start to finish. Upon finishing, I went directly to my computer to see if the library had the next volume. When I saw that the second book, The Ask and the Answer was available at the library in a neighboring town, I loaded up the kids in the car and drove over to check it out, which was a first for me. Then I proceeded to read the entire second book in one evening.

The titles, "The Knife of Never Letting Go," "The Ask and the Answer," and "Monsters of Men," (the upcoming third volume) don't really give you any idea of what the books are about. I know I was completely mystified about the meaning of the first and second book titles until I had read a bit of each book, then the titles made perfect sense.

If you like young adult fiction or dystopian fiction, then don't let this book pass you by. Fans of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and The Maze Runner by James Dashner should not be disappointed by this first book in the Chaos Walking Trilogy. I liked this book so much, that it will be one of my top reads of 2009, and it has found a permanent place on my bookshelf. ( )

Todd and Viola, Prentisstown. Looking forward to Book 2 ( )