The Knife of Never Letting Go - by Patrick Ness.

I did it! I finished:

I was thrown into the bizarre New World of Ness’s first novel because his last book in this trilogy won the Carnegie award in 2011 and thus forms part of my set reading for my course in Children’s Literature. Not wanting to limit my options for my final assessment I figured I had better get reading with the first two novels before I could concentrate on the final book, Monsters of Men. It took me months to get half way and days to finish it. I found the pace in parts slow although the praise that is heaped on this book in the first pages is contrary: “Ness moves things along at a breakneck pace..” (Financial Times critic). I found it sometimes repetitive and dragging its feet in getting to the truth of the story and so many times I was tempted to return it to the library so that I didn’t have to renew it, again,  but then it suddenly did pick up pace and became almost unbearable to put down – although I knew it was going to break my heart (which it did). I was glad that I bought the set for my sister as a ‘shared’ Christmas present so that I could start reading the second book straight away as it did finish on a cliff-hanger.

The style of writing is intriguing as it not written in standard English or with standardised spellings, ‘preparayshuns’ (p.4) and ‘cuz’ (for because P.5).

 ‘ “You can eff off, too,” I say, except I don’t say “eff”, I say what “eff” stands for.

          And I really, really shoulda looked round again. P.6

And then there’s the swearing which is always (except once I think) represented as ‘eff’ or ‘effing’, which I thought was good. I don’t like swearing for the sake of swearing in books but I think this really did help me to relate to the teenage character of Todd. The brave aspect of this book was representing what Ness terms as the ‘Noise’ which is the thoughts and feelings of the characters which can be seen and read by others and in the text of the book is represented with different fonts in terms of size and space on the page as pages 20-1 shows.

Overall, I enjoyed (that’s not quite the right word) the ending of this book and think it probably could have been cut down by a few chapters to get to the climax a bit quicker but who knows maybe there were details in the slow areas that are going to be imperative in the following books. I will have to wait and see.

I think that most teenagers will enjoy this book – there is violence, swearing, dangerous situations that remind me very much of the computer games they like to submerge themselves in nowadays, but there are also fundamental themes and questions of existence, identity, acceptance and tolerance which are subtly weaved through the story so that you are continually seeking for the ‘truth’.