The Knife of Never Letting Go

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'm sure it has been a torturous two weeks waiting for me to write another blog post. I've decided to grace you with my presence one last time before the quarter ends. Now that you've read the opening paragraph, go ahead and scroll down. Make some comment about how the book sounds interesting, if only you had enough time to read it. Get that comment grade up to an A! Chances are you've only got a couple days before the quarter ends.

Now that those comment fiends are gone, let's get on with the book review. I've read a couple books since last week, including City of Thieves, The Little Book, and Prey. But today we're going to talk about Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first in a trilogy.

The Knife of Never Letting Go starts out from the perspective of a boy named Todd. It's written as if it's his diary, and he's not very literate. If you've ever read books like Wuthering Heights where the dialogue is written as it sounds, you know how annoying it is to read broken English. His broken English isn't even consistent. Sometimes you can barely understand what Todd is trying to get across, and other times he sounds like a normal narrator.

Don't let the somewhat annoying narration stop you from reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, though. It's an extremely unique and interesting book. The book is set on an unnamed planet, a couple years after the first wave of settlers arrived. Todd lives in a small village inhabited by only men. He's told that all the women in the town died from a disease. Everyone (or at least Todd thinks it's everyone) on the planet who didn't die from the disease can hear each other's thoughts. As you can imagine, this causes lots of mayhem and confusion. Todd's parents are killed, and he ends up running away. In the wilderness, he finds a girl named Viola. He finds out that Viola and her parents' were scouting out the planet for the second wave of colonists when their pod crashes, killing both of her parents. Men from Todd's town have started to follow him, so the two of them run away together.

I won't give anything more away to avoid spoilers, but I highly recommend this book. If you like a good love story that isn't narrated by a girl (stupid girly emotions), this book is perfect. At times it can seem slow, but it's well worth getting through to the end, because there are LOTS of plot twists. LOTS!!!