Review: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

This book is from my most recent book haul. I bought it because I have been hearing so many good things about Patrick Ness and his writing on Youtube, that I thought this could only go well. But I must confess I was pretty disappointed in this book. I did not really like the writing style, but I think (hope) that it is unique to this book as it fits the story and the narrator. So I won’t give up on Patrick Ness just yet!

But let’s start from the beginning!

This book is the first in a trilogy called “Chaos Walking”. I must confess I did not really research what the book was about before I bought it. I had just heard it was some form of fantasy and I figured I would give it a go. It is about settlers from Earth who are now inhabiting a different planet. The narrator is a young boy, Todd, who eagerly awaits his thirteenth birthday when he will become a man. He lives in a town with all men, and he is the last boy left, as all his friends are older than him. In this town there are only men, as the women were killed by a disease unleashed by the aliens originally inhabiting this planet. Another disease means that everyone can hear everyone else’s thoughts and it gets loud sometimes. This is called the Noise, and it features a lot throughout the book. 

Beware of spoiler-ey bits below! 

At the beginning of the book Todd meets a new settler who has just arrived by way of a crashed scouting spaceship. This is a young girl who does not have any Noise. When Todd’s stepfathers realize what is happening they send him off down the river with no other explanation than that he has to get out of there. Down the river he goes with his dog, and they pick up the girl on the way, soon to be followed by an army from his town who are out to get him. 

The rest of the book features their travel towards the end goal at the end of the river and their trials along the way. 

Some of these trials I found hard to appreciate. Like the preacher Aaron, who stalks them, and even though he gets stabbed and bitten by crocs and burnt and I don’t know what else, he still survives to pop up again like an evil jack-in-the-box. Characters like these just really annoy me! It’s like Dmitri from “The Bronze Horseman” by Paullina Simons. You think he is dead, only for him to show up at the most inconvenient time for your main protagonists. I feel like this is a little bit of an easy way to add suspense and shock effect. The bad guy comes along and there is a fight and it’s all action and excitement until the bad guy “dies”. Then there is a period of relative calm and when it’s time for action again, what do you know, the bad guy is back!! Instead of finding other obstacles, the same bad guy is recycled constantly. If you need the bad guy for the end, then don’t let us think he died! It just gets tiring to constantly have him pop up, when you thought he was disposed of. 

Todd is just a boy and not yet a man, which apparently means there is a whole slew of things that he doesn’t know. That means we don’t know them either, as he is the narrator, and this was really frustrating to me. Not that I want to know every detail before the story starts, I do like to have SOME surprises along the way, but Todd knows absolutely nothing about basic details of his world. This is because these details were kept hidden from him, fair enough, but when he finds them out, there is never time to explain them, because the action starts up and that leaves us hanging on hints for almost the entire book. This takes away from the suspense for me. I like to have SOME idea of what’s at stake. We don’t know why they want Todd so bad, so we don’t know what’s at stake for them or him or how far they are willing to go to get him. As mentioned we get a few hints throughout the book, but nothing is really explained until the end. Todd himself sometimes hints of things he learns from the Noise of others, but even he keeps these things from us, the readers. I found that REALLY frustrating in the end, and when the big reveal came I almost didn’t care. 

Speaking of the big reveal I thought it was a bit underwhelming. The reason they wanted Todd and had chased him down the river seemed a bit immaterial to me. He was made out to be essential to this “project”, but the reason that was given just didn’t really make sense to me. I assume it was supposed to be a religious thing or something, but I don’t know. It just didn’t really resonate with me.

The narration took some getting used to as Todd’s voice is quite special. He tells the story in his local dialect, which I guess is quite hillbilly-esque. I didn’t really mind that, but the way it is told is just pretty much all his thoughts put on paper. I find that writing style annoying more than anything else. We do get examples of the Noise and I thought that was quite well done as it illustrated the onslaught of men’s thoughts constantly bearing down on you. 

As you can maybe tell by the above I didn’t love this book. I didn’t hate it either, I just didn’t really like that much. I gave it 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, because it did have its moments though they were few and far between.