The Knife of Never Letting Go BY Patrick Ness | BOOK REVIEW

TITLE: The Knife Of Never Letting Go (Book 1 Of CHAOS WALKING series) AUTHOR: Patrick Ness PUBLICATION YEAR: 2008 GENRE: Young Adult Science Fiction PAGE COUNT: 479 FORMAT: Paperback AVAILABLE  AT : amazon

 Ever since I read and loved  The Monster Calls (see Review here) by Patrick Ness ,I have been trying to read more of his books . The Chaos Walking Series is the one that everyone seemed to be recommending.  Also if I am not  mistaken  there is a movie coming up starring Tom Holland based on this series  next year. So I bought the first book The Knife of Never Letting Go to try and see if I like it  so that I can continue on with the series.

The story follows a boy named Todd Hewitt who is believed to be the last boy in this strange town called prentisstown where exists no women.  It  is  more or less like a dystopian world where men are able to hear each other’s thoughts . At the beginning of the story, he is eagerly waiting for his birthday which will turn him into a man.  But one day, Todd happens to find a place where no such phenomena occurs i.e. he isn’t able to hear any noise. This sets into motion a series of devastating incidents where practically everyone from his town is upto  kill him. He tries to escape and thus we get to experience his extraordinary survival story thereby figuring out the mysteries surrounding this strange dystopian town.

Although it is categorized under  young adult science fiction, it reads more like dystopian . Apart from the mention of a spaceship and aliens, there were not many scientific elements in the story.

It was a well paced story with sufficient plot twists that kept me hooked  . Some scenes felt a bit repetitive though but it never managed to bore me in any way. Each chapter ended with either a revelation or some kind of a plot twist which made me turn to the next chapter almost immediately. I love this style of story telling  where the author ends a chapter on a high so that us readers are left with no choice but continue . This reminded me of another book The Shadow of the Wind (see Review here)  where the author Carlos Ruiz Zafon  seamlessly crafted the plot twists at every chapter to keep  the readers engaged .

The other thing that stood out for me were the two major antagonists – Prentiss and Aaron. These guys were brutal and dark . They were flawed and did some really nasty stuff to our main lead Todd . These guys were power hungry crazy people who did not think twice before acting . I have not encountered  such dark characters in books before . For some reason , the sinful actions of the bad guys is always justified by the authors .Very often they try to give a backstory to these negative characters in order to make them seem like people who are doing wrong because of their troubled past. I was thankful that we did not come across such trope in this story . I believe that  when the villain is strong , the hero begins to shine and so does the story.

The writing style was pretty unique. The author deliberately put lots of spelling mistakes and punctuation errors in order to make this feel real. We are told that these characters  have never been to school or had  any kind of formal education which made sense of all those grammatically incorrect sentences . This style of storytelling was totally new to me.
However I  found our main character Todd Hewitt extremely whiny and annoying . There were times when I  was rooting for the bad guys so that Todd would suffer some more ... LOL!!! 😆😆 ..This may sound insane but trust me – he does something which will make you hate his guts.  More on that on my spoiler section.  His dog Manchee was the best animal character I have read so far.

The other issue I had was the weak  climax. The whole motive behind everything that was happening in the story was simply bizarre and ridiculous . It made no sense to me whatsoever .

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Let’s address  the scene where the faithful dog Manchee dies. Very few books have made me cry . And  this scene where Todd chose Viola over Manchee and let him die was just heartbreaking . BTW Manchee was the most loyal companion to Todd and he saved his life a couple of times in the story.

Apart from this, I found Todd’s indecisiveness extremely  annoying. I just can’t fathom why he wasn’t able to kill Aaron at multiple occasions . Let me give you my series of thoughts while reading about his journey -  The first time Todd couldn’t find the courage to kill Aaron  , I wrote on my sticky note “ the fact that Todd wasn’t able to kill a person in self defence shows how nice a person he is”
But when it happened again and again, I found him the biggest idiot in this whole damn world.  He had an upper hand in so many such occasions where he could have used his knife to kill but he didnt. At first I thought it was because of moral obligations on his part. But later on, when he managed to kill a weak innocent spackle , my blood started boiling with anger. I swear I wanted to kill Todd instead. LOL..!!😆😆 I still Don’t  get it why he had such a hard time  killing bad guys but had no difficulty when it came to killing the innocent spackle.

A few lines about the other main character Viola . I had a hard time trying to figure out whether I should put her in the spoiler section or not.  This was because  her introduction in the story was a shocking plot twist to me. She was a bold courageous girl who faced all the difficulties head on. I also loved how she showed kindness to the people in need . I also liked how she was able to put some sense into Todd’s mind  who was going on committing one foolish action after the other.

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Overall , I found this book highly entertaining which successfully invoked a wide range of emotions within me- from happiness to sadness to rage . This is a sign of a highly enjoyable read according to me. It also promotes the idea of hope in a good way which we all are in desperate need in this day and age. However , I am not sure if I want to continue on with the series. 😏

RATING- 🌕🌕🌕🌖 ( 3.25/5 )