The knife of never letting go

Great fast-paced chase, I also adored the fact that information about New World gets revealed gradually, mantaining curiosity in the reader. I also liked the presence of interesting themes (the possibility of reading other people's thoughts, regimes, war, etc.). BUT there's a big "but": I don't find Todd a believable character, not to mention the exagerated amount of unfortunate events he finds himself into, which sounded like an excuse to keep the reader hooked without mantaining credibility and coherence. Too many times Todd played dumb, too many times he was reluctant to take specific actions that anyone in his situations would have taken (I'm not specifing further in order to avoid spoilers). A character so unbelievable that shattered into pieces my suspension of disbelief.
However, to anyone reading this far in this review, keep in mind that the aforementioned flaws seems to be typical of the young adult genre, meaning that if you are accustomed to them and want to focus on the good parts, I encourage you to read it anyway. Overall it's an interesting read.

When I started reading this book, I thought I'd never make it through. I didn't like the constantly angry teenage boy who was to be the hero and narrator. And I was annoyed by the intentional misspellings and grammatical errors which made it additionally hard for me as a non-native speaker of English to understand. I didn't get hooked to the actual story until about page 30 when the first bits of information "arrive".

Todd, the constantly angry teenager mentioned before, has to learn, in a very hard way, that all he knew about his world were lies. And that there is a lot more world than he thought.

The reader learns about this New World at Todd's pace. And while he is running quite a lot, he hasn't got that much time to think about more general implications of his discoveries. The novel is very high-paced and action-packed, so much so that I'd wished for a little more conversation and a little less action. Maybe the intended readers, teenage boys, I presume, like it that way. I wouldn't know, never having been a teenage boy myself.
This is a pity because the world Ness has created is so very interesting and promising. Maybe there will be more explaining in the other parts of the trilogy.

All in all, the book was more interesting than I thought at the start - therefore I gave it 4 stars. And I also thought about reading the rest. But strangely the ending, a cliffhanger, put me off it: again, too much action and too little information. This is how it lost the 5.

At first I had difficulties getting into this book because of how the narrator speaks and his pronunciation (or pronunseyahasun) of words. The predictable escalation of the story prior to the chapter break got a little tiresome and I didn't find myself enjoying the story that much. I came to the Chaos Walking series because of a review that mentioned it while discussing The Hunger Games and I thought I would receive the same level of enjoyment. While I enjoyed The Hunger Games series more, I am willing to give the rest of the Chaos Walking stories a chance, especially after the last 30% of the book improved and started to accelerate the story.

The concept of Noise, settling on a foreign world to start over and the mystery around Prentisstown kept me going and it was an easier story to get into when I was able to read larger chunks of the story in a single sitting. I feel that if this story was executed differently I may have really enjoyed it, but for the pros and cons of the book it's a solid three stars and will offer an easy read for a unique story.

You know when everyone tells you a book is amazing and when you get round to reading it, it falls a bit flat in your expectations? That's how I feel about The Knife of Never Letting Go. I'm pretty sure I'd have enjoyed it more if I wasn't expecting it to become suddenly amazing after each passing chapter.

Not to say it isn't a good book. The idea of being able to hear everyone's thoughts provides an interesting narrative, the first person accounts are not necessarily Todd's. Todd is the last boy in Prentisstown and is about to become a man in a world without women. At the start of the book, it's made clear that what Todd thinks to be true isn't the actual truth. As an adult reader, I think I worked it all out far too quickly and just wanted to get to the end to have it confirmed.

Read more on this topic at my blog.