Review: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Summary and author bio from Amazon

Imagine you're the only boy in a town of men. And you can hear everything they think. And they can hear everything you think. Imagine you don't fit in with their plans... Todd Hewitt is just one month away from the birthday that will make him a man. But his town has been keeping secrets from him. Secrets that are going to force him to run...

Patrick Ness is the author of two critically acclaimed works of fiction, The Crash of Hennington and Topics About Which I Know Nothing. An award-winning novelist, he has also written for Radio 4, the Sunday Telegraph and is currently a literary critic for the Guardian. This is his first book for young adults.


Review:

The Knife of Never Letting Go: The Most Disappointing Book I’ve Read This Year

At first, I thought that The Knife of Never Letting Go had potential with the intriguing way in which the inhabitants of Prentisstown lived with the ‘Noise’-their unstoppable telepathic abilities and I was very curious to learn more about why there was an absence of women.

Ness’s writing style was very unique and descriptive. The long passages describing the terrain created a nice visual picture in my mind. After a while, Todd’s repetition and use of slang was extremely wearing on the nerves. I believe that if the repetition was cut out, it would reduce a third of the book without taking away anything from the content. Additionally, this means that the book was slow paced.
Another reason that I felt that the book was sluggish to read was because Todd and Viola were fleeing and on the road for most of the book rather than in the centre of the action (which is where I like the main characters to be). This was really frustrating. I felt like I was hearing about what was going on elsewhere only through secondary characters and not through Todd and Viola’s own accounts.

In regards to the characters, I liked Todd at the beginning of the book as he did have a unique voice; however, his repetition, ignorance and stubbornness let him down as the story wore on. I found Todd to be narrow-minded and uneducated. He wouldn’t let anyone help him even though he needed all the help he could get. I was expecting a lot from Viola as she was, for the most part, the only female character that we were acquainted with and I liked her slightly better than Todd.

A lot of importance was placed on Todd’s Ma’s book and it made me believe that all my questions would be answered-however this did not transpire. By the time that Todd got over his pride and let Viola read his Ma’s book (he couldn’t read it himself because he was illiterate) only one or two of the numerous questions that I had were answered and I did not believe this was a sufficient reward for my patient reading.

The women in Prentiss Town could read the telepathic thoughts of the men, however the men could not perceive the thoughts of the women. Why didn’t the women escape before they were killed if they could read the men’s thoughts? Wouldn’t they have heard the build up of the sinister thoughts? Ness has not answered these questions in the book and it left me feeling cheated. This was only one example of a stream of unanswered questions in The Knife of Never Letting Go.

The only time Todd and Viola met an original inhabitant of New World was when Todd killed one and that did not leave much time for a conversation-orally or telepathically. Ness missed a vital opportunity here for letting us learn more about the natives.

A lot of the time, suspense was heavily built up but no answers were delivered within the framework of the book which often left me feeling exasperated and frustrated. For example, the ending left much to be desired as it was anticlimactic after the high expectations of a large scale battle in a city- this ‘battle’ ended before it even began.

There were elements in the book that were not realistic. An example is that Viola was sent on a scout ship with her parents to survey the planet for viable settlements and to establish a base camp for the mother ship they came from which housed thousands of people. I find it highly unlikely that only two adults and a child would be sent to prepare a colony when thousands of lives depend on their success.

A major irritation in the novel was that characters that I thought were incontrovertibly dead from horrific injuries kept jumping up again-their injuries not slowing them down at all. This was very unrealistic and it was left unexplained. Most of all, it was comical. I don’t think that was what Ness was aiming for in this mostly dark story. Characters such as Aaron and Mr Prentiss Junior were human, just like Todd and Viola, although they seemed to demonstrate superhuman abilities- like rising from the dead!

Overall, while I felt The Knife of Never Letting Go had potential, I did not like this book at all as it left me thoroughly frustrated by the end of it and I will not be reading the next book, The Ask and The Answer.

Rating: 2/5


I am reviewing this as part of Dystopian August which is going on at Presenting Lenore