The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking)
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Review
"* "Ness is a young writer of exciting quality and unpredictability." The Times * "One of the best first sentences I've ever read and a book that lives up to it!" Frank Cottrell-Boyce"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
An unflinching novel about the impossible choices of growing up, by an award-winning writer.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A awesome debut!,
This review is from: The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking) (Paperback)
Todd Hewitt is twelve, the last boy in Prentisstown, a town of only men. He lives in a world full of "noise" in which the private thoughts of every man and animal are audible. In one month he will be thirteen and a man. But the town is keeping secrets from him, secrets that will force him to go on the run from the mayor and the men of Prentisstown along with his dog and the first girl he has ever met.
This is quite frankly an astounding novel, quite deserving of the awards Ness has won. It is furiously paced with terrifying, exhilarating and heartbreaking moments, with fantastic cliff-hangers interspersed with philosophical pauses. It is one of those gems that are sometimes found in children's literature; a genuinely original novel that is also well written, grabs hold of the imagination and will not allow you to put it down. You will find yourself growing more and more attached to Todd and Viola as the story and their friendship progresses, and feel genuine affection for Todd's dog and sidekick, Manchee, whose behaviour is both hilarious and heart-warming. At its core it is a story about a boy forced to grow up fast in a world crumbling into madness and armed only with his conviction to do right to help him take on the desperate fight to survive. The book is aimed at young teenagers, and we would recommend it for readers aged 13 and upwards, but it will also appeal very strongly to adults. I can not rate this highly enough. If the well thought out plot line, characters that lift from the page and the genuinely original idea at the core of the book wasn't enough, Ness's dialogue and style of writing would be enough to recommend this book. If you want to read a truly great piece of children's fiction then this is the one for you.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely Astounding, Astonishing and any other word for adoration you can think of.,
This review is from: The Knife of Never Letting Go: bk. 1 (Chaos Walking) (Hardcover)
I feel revealing anything in the plot of this book wouldn't be doing it justice, having freshly finished the read, having barely put it down once, secrecy is so much to this book. In short the book places Todd Hewitt and his dog Manchee in a place called Prentisstown, which you quickly learn is a city on a New World colonised by man. 12 Years and 12 months old Todd Hewitt is 1 month from becoming a 'Man'. There is a key difference about New World however, it's native the Spackle, didn't take kindly to man and in act of war released the Noise Germ. A bug which killed off every last woman, and left the thoughts of man open like a book. As the basis of a story its unique, but the way in which it has been considered is sheer genius. In a world where EVERY LAST THOUGHT can be heard by and from everyone, all that's left is noise. The incomprehensible thoughts of a population of 147. In such an existence, you would think secrets, impossible to keep, certainly as hard as Todd tried, it didn't take long for the town to overhear his thoughts about a mysterious hole where noise didn't exist, but its only after that the truth of the Last Populated Town on New Earth comes out. You would be a fool not to buy this book, it is sheer genius. Having bought it, i defy you to put it down and you had better have some money spare for The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking) once you're done cause it ends in a pretty big cliffhanger.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Harsh, graphic, but remarkable,
By
This review is from: The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking) (Paperback)
What a revelation this turned out to be. Whilst Ness doesn't deliver the kind of philosophical and intellectual depth and challenge of Phillip Pullman's brilliant "Dark Materials" trilogy, he has written a story that compares well with those landmark volumes in terms of literary merit, readability and sheer excitement.
The text is written in the first person, one of the most challenging forms of fiction to both write and read I feel, taking the view of a teenager (Todd) on a planet that has been settled by a small group of what are effectively refugees from Earth. Don't despair of the sci-fi concept, because this is in many ways just a handy conceit to allow Ness to play with a range of very clever literary devices and to free up the moral landscape within which his characters operate. Similar to Pullman's inspired idea of characters in his world having, in essence, external souls in the form of animals, Ness's protaganists are afflicted with "noise": they can hear each other's thoughts. He handles this device quite brilliantly, using it to drive the plot but not tripping up on the myriad of potential complications that could arise. The book is really about growing up and understanding your identity, but it takes the form of a quest or journey, which is physical in the A to B sense but spiritual and personal in the context of the character's personalities. The triumph of the book lies in the sheer quality of the writing however. It is largely written in Todd's vernacular, a version of American hick I suppose, and uses sentence structure and (even in the Kindle version) formatting of text to add impact and tension. I've seen other reviewers complaining that this makes the book hard to read, and querying deliberate spelling errors and abbreviations, but personally I'm happy to see these sort of devices used if they add to the overall impact of the novel, and in this case they absolutely do. I would say that parents should think carefully before letting younger children read this book. It is occasionally very violent and graphic, is morally ambiguous in parts, contains serious bad language and hints broadly at rape and other very adult themes, including genocide. As with Pullman's books, I'm not entirely clear how you define this as a children's or teenager's book anyway. For me it addresses adult sensibilities just as much as it does kid's. However, a well adjusted and intelligent teenager should be able to handle it, and it may prove to be a good source of discussion and debate. It's nothing worse than you'd get on prime time TV, and you could do a lot worse than adding it to a literature curriculum in my opinion. In the end it is a great read and I couldn't put it down as it lurched towards a conclusion. It is also exciting, with some unexpected twists, and surprisingly shocking in places, perhaps because of the graphic nature of parts of it (which perhaps I wasn't expecting in a children's book) but also because Ness is not afraid to go down the hard narrative road. Sentimental it isn't. I've already started the second part of the trilogy, which is already proving to be clever, surprising and potentially rather deeper in terms of its themes. Hugely recommended.
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