The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking) [Kindle Edition]

Patrick Ness (Author)

Book Description

Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him -- something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn't she killed by the germ like all the females on New World? Propelled by Todd's gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up—Todd Hewitt lives in a world in which all women are dead, and the thoughts of men and animals are constantly audible as Noise. Graphically represented by a set of scratchy fonts and sentence fragments that run into and over each other, Noise is an oppressive chaos of words, images, and sounds that makes human company exhausting and no thought truly private. The history of these peculiar circumstances unfolds over the course of the novel, but Ness's basic world-building is so immediately successful that readers, too, will be shocked when Todd and his dog, Manchee, first notice a silence in the Noise. Realizing that he must keep the silence secret from the town leaders, he runs away, and his terrified flight with an army in pursuit makes up the backbone of the plot. The emotional, physical, and intellectual drama is well crafted and relentless. Todd, who narrates in a vulnerable and stylized voice, is a sympathetic character who nevertheless makes a few wrenching mistakes. Manchee and Aaron, a zealot preacher, function both as characters and as symbols. Tension, suspense, and the regular bombardment of Noise are palpable throughout, mitigated by occasional moments of welcome humor. The cliff-hanger ending is unexpected and unsatisfying, but the book is still a pleasure for sophisticated readers comfortable with the length and the bleak, literary tone.—Megan Honig, New York Public Library
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Chased by a madman preacher and possibly the rest of his townsfolk as well, young Todd Hewitt flees his settlement on a planet where war with the natives has killed all the women and infected the men with a germ that broadcasts their thoughts aloud for all to hear. This cacophanous thought-cloud is known as Noise and is rendered with startling effectiveness on the page. The first of many secrets is revealed when Todd discovers an unsettling hole in the Noise, and quickly realizes that he lives in a much different world than the one he thought he did. Some of the central conceits of the drama can be hard to swallow, but the pure inventiveness and excitement of the telling more than make up for it. Narrated in a sort of pidgin English with crack dramatic and comic timing by Todd and featuring one of the finest talking-dog characters anywhere, this troubling, unforgettable opener to the Chaos Walking trilogy is a penetrating look at the ways in which we reveal ourselves to one another, and what it takes to be a man in a society gone horribly wrong. The cliffhanger ending is as effective as a shot to the gut. Grades 8-12. --Ian Chipman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 1656 KB
• Print Length: 479 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0763645761
• Publisher: Candlewick; Reprint edition (October 18, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0044UHVR2
• Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,475 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 122 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't let this one go... January 12, 2010

By MsPolitix

Format:Paperback

...or you'll have missed out on a brilliant book. I won't regale you with plot details (you can find them elsewhere easily enough and I'd hate to spoil this for you), I'll just tell you why I loved it.

A few months ago, I was complaining to a friend that there was nothing really original coming out these days in the areas of speculative fiction, particularly when it comes to the YA end of the spectrum. It all seems to be vampires this, werewolves that, discovering latent magical powers here, falling in angsty love with someone with magical powers there... My friend listened patiently and then recommended that I read the 'The Knife of Never Letting Go'. Friends are great.

I chewed through this book in a few sessions. I wouldn't have put it down if everyday life hadn't so rudely interrupted. It made me laugh, cry and cheer. Then I gave it to my partner who is not a keen fiction reader and he loved it as well.

Before Patrick Ness started punching out punchy fiction, he was (and still is) a journalist. It shows. Not a word is wasted in this book, the prose is always expertly crafted and never dithering waffle. The post-apocalyptic dystopian world is unique and wonderfully built, even though we only get to see it through the eyes of Todd, our illiterate protagonist. Ness evokes a rare and pure honesty in Todd's voice that immediately sweeps us up in the action and continues to hurtle us through the story until we slam into the brick wall of an ending.

'The Knife of Never Letting Go' is a masterpiece in itself, but thank the Muses that Chaos Walking is going to be a trilogy.

My 'Where It's At' rating: 4.8/5

@@@@ Plot
@@@@@ Pace
@@@@@ World
@@@@@ Characters
@@@@@ Style

57 of 64 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars If it weren't for the ending, I'd rank it higher October 24, 2008

By DJLA531 VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Todd lives in Prentisstown, a dystopian nightmare where all women are dead and everyone can hear each other's thoughts (known as noise). As the only "boy", the youngest in the restless and violent town, Todd's only real companion is his (talking) dog, Manchee. When he discovers a girl in the swamp one day, his caretakers tell him he's in danger and he has to make a run for it.

As thus begins book one of the Chaos Walking trilogy. It's best to go into the book knowing only as much as Todd knows (which is surprisingly little considering no one's thoughts are private), so I won't go into spoilers here. Suffice to say that leaving Prentisstown considerably expands Todd's worldview and understanding. Todd is an intriguing character, a real innocent, with a voice that matches his lack of education.

The ideas here are very creative, especially in regards to the noise. It's interesting to see what animals have to say (not much of interest actually) and how differently the various settlements Todd encounters on his journey have dealt with the problem of broadcasting their every thought.

I cruised through this thinking the whole time that it's an A-/B+ book - until I hit the ending. The narrative is dark, but the ending is even darker and though it works on an intellectual level, it's an emotional sucker punch - a cliffhanger that makes you think the book must be missing some pages.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too January 6, 2009

By TeensReadToo

Format:Hardcover

On a far-flung world newly settled by humanity, twelve-year-old Todd Hewitt of Prentisstown is a boy on the brink of becoming a man.

When settlers came to this world, they found it already inhabited by aliens known as the Spackle, and a war was waged against them to colonize the planet. Now, almost twenty years after the first settlers landed, the world is low-tech but free of the "spacks." However, they left behind them the "Noise germ," a chemical contaminant that causes all the men who come in contact with it to broadcast their thoughts for everyone's hearing--and kills all the infected women.

On the eve of his thirteenth birthday, Todd has never seen a woman. He was the last child born in the settlement before his mother succumbed to the Noise germ and died, and now he's the only boy left in the village of Prentisstown, all the others having turned thirteen and been proclaimed men. Now, with Todd's birthday approaching, the entire town is anxious, and Todd can hear it.

The men of the town are keeping something from him; although they can hear each other think, it's possible to learn techniques that allow one to control the information that others can hear. Ben and Cillian, his adoptive guardians and old friends of his parents, are both worried for him, though Todd doesn't know why.

And then, with less than a month to go until Todd's thirteenth birthday, he stumbles across a secret that no boy is meant to know and all men have been forced to forget, a secret about the history of his world and the lies he's been told. Todd has no choice but to escape from the town he's called his home and the people who have been his parents, on the run from something more terrible than the alien Spackle, and more familiar....

The sheer intensity of the story Ness tells kept me reading straight through this book, despite its length and occasionally hefty prose. Todd's first-person, present-tense narration has an inexorable pull that places the reader within the context of the story and keeps you turning the pages. The plot is full of twists and turns, the world is immaculately and innovatively crafted, and the characters' pain and longing seeps from the pages.

My largest complaint with this book was the way in which it ended, without resolving some major issues that had been significant throughout the story. It is the first book in a series, so this sense of incompleteness may be slightly forgiven, but I felt like I'd spent the entire book hurtling forward into empty space only to be slammed at the last minute against a brick wall.

That said, I'd recommend THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO to anyone who enjoys dystopia or slightly darker fiction, and I know I can't wait to see what happens next!

Reviewed by: Candace Cunard Read more ›

169 of 208 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Violent Melodrama Is No Substitute For A Story December 15, 2010

By waltmorton

Format:Paperback

If you read the Amazon reviews of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO you will see many 5-star ratings from readers and only a few 1 and 2-star ratings.

I am in the 1-star camp and let me tell you why:

If you read the 5-star reviewers, you will see that many of these folks reacted to Patrick Ness writing which, in it's essence, is very creative and skillful. He knows how to write an economical sentence and sketch in a character. He is not afraid to try fresh and daring constructions of words on the page. His presentation of telepathy is original, interesting, and very well handled so that you do believe: "Yes this is what if would be like if you could hear everyone's thoughts." So I can understand many readers being hooked. But even among the 5-star reviewers you find people who say: "I loved and hated this book."

Let's look at why you might hate it:

Where Ness fails almost completely is as a storyteller. Rather than taking the time to construct authentically believable dramatic situations, Ness seems to think that the shortest path to drama is violence. The beatings start on page 6 and are followed by stabbings, shootings, kickings, guns, knives, machetes, maiming and gruesome killings. When the plot of endless pursuit on a frontier planet called New World slows down, it usually offers a brutal scene of struggle & capture. I am not a reader who objects to violence, but I do object when it is pointless and offered in place of a story. This random violence is not drama -- it is melodrama and a shameless manipulation to jerk the readers emotions around. You know it's melodrama for one simple reason: the bad guys NEVER have a problem finding our protagonists and tormenting them.... Any logic would tell you that on a sparsely populated frontier planet it might be hard to find two people who are hiding. Nope. Not here. Even the bad guys can hardly believe it when they catch the young runaways (again) and say: "Yer taking the ROAD?! You ain't even going OFF TRAIL?" Ness succeeds in his melodrama superbly, and you can see that success in reader's reactions who are emotionally moved by the book. But an emotional reaction to this book is not enough to make it good fiction. You get an emotional reaction from one of the SAW movies when someone is being tortured, but it's hard to argue torture has merit as artistic expression. THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO has won a few literary prizes. Rather than an endorsement of the excellence of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, I see this as an indication of the lack of perspective among the judges, who no doubt found the merits of this work to exceed it's failings. Perhaps the over-violent failings of Ness can best be understood by looking at two other award-winning writers, Mark Twain and Cormac McCarthy. All three of these writers have written multiple books about "youth on the frontier."

Mark Twain, writing in the 1870's sets up the plot of THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER with one murder, that's all he needs to set a timeless classic in motion. ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1885) bears some strong similarities to THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO. Both offer vernacular language, local customs, religion, being "on the run," and the search for freedom and identity. HUCKLEBERRY FINN is not without violence. There are corpses uncovered, blood feuds, and threatened lynchings. But the overall level of violence in Twain's classic novels is far less than in Ness's melodrama. That's because Twain understood it was characters that drove the story. If the characters were good enough, you don't need somebody stabbed every two pages to hold the reader's interest.

Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed BLOOD MERIDIAN (1985) is not a young adult novel, but it offers the same kind of teenage frontier protagonist. Ness's "Todd Hewitt" is McCarthy's "the kid." BLOOD MERIDIAN is worth noting because it is much more violent than THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO. In fact BLOOD MERIDIAN may well be the most violent book I have ever read, which is not surprising when the basic plot is: a teenage kid joins a murderous gang of scalp hunters who massacre indians. The violence in BLOOD MERIDIAN was not missed by critics: Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the best 20th century American novels, describing it as "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick," but admitted that he found the book's pervasive violence so distasteful that he had several false starts before reading the book entirely. James Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions... In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else." The point here is McCarthy never used violence for melodrama and cheap emotional effect -- Ness, that's his whole game plan.

Is there anything "wrong" with melodrama? Not really. And It's possible the amped-up violence of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO is just a reaction to the times we live in, where video-game violence brings sky-high body counts and much of the entertainment media aimed at youth culture offers casual murder. But we are in sad shape as readers if we become so desperate for stimulation that violence is a catch-all solution for boredom, thought, art and beauty. Are you bored reading this? Just kill something. Read more ›

More About the Author

As a child
I was born on an army base called Fort Belvoir, near Alexandria, Virginia, in the United States. My father was a drill sergeant in the US Army, but much nicer than that makes him seem. I only stayed at Fort Belvoir for the first four months of my life and have never even been back to the East Coast of America. We moved to Hawaii, where I lived until I was almost six. I went to kindergarten there, and we used to have field trips down to Waikiki Beach. I once picked up a living sea urchin and got about a hundred needle pricks in the palm of my hand. I made up stories all the time as a kid, though I was usually too embarrassed to show them to anybody.

As an adult
I've only ever really wanted to be a writer. I studied English Literature at the University of Southern California, and when I graduated, I got a job as a corporate writer at a cable company in Los Angeles, writing manuals and speeches and once even an advertisement for the Gilroy, California Garlic Festival. I got my first story published in Genre magazine in 1997 and was working on my first novel, The Crash of Hennington, when I moved to London in 1999. I've lived here ever since. I taught Creative Writing at Oxford University for three years, usually to students older than I was.

As an artist
So far, I've published two books for adults, a novel called The Crash of Hennington and a short story collection called Topics About Which I Know Nothing, a title which seemed funny at the time but less so 10,000 mentions later... Here's a helpful hint if you want to be a writer: When I'm working on a first draft, all I write is 1000 words a day, which isn't that much (I started out with 300, then moved up to 500, now I can do 1000 easy). And if I write my 1000 words, I'm done for the day, even if it only took an hour (it usually takes more, of course, but not always). Novels are anywhere from 60,000 words on up, so it's possible that just sixty days later you might have a whole first draft. The Knife of Never Letting Go is 112,900 words and took about seven months to get a good first draft. Lots of rewrites followed. That's the fun part, where the book really starts to come together just exactly how you see it, the part where you feel like a real writer.

Things you didn't know about Patrick Ness
1. I have a tattoo of a rhinoceros.
2. I have run two marathons.
3. I am a certified scuba diver.
4. I wrote a radio comedy about vampires.
5. I have never been to New York City but...
6. I have been to Sydney, Auckland and Tokyo.
7. I was accepted into film school but turned it down to study writing.
8. I was a goth as a teenager (well, as much of a goth as you could be in Tacoma, Washington and still have to go to church every Sunday).
9. I am no longer a goth.
10. Under no circumstances will I eat onions.

*******

Patrick Ness is the author of the Chaos Walking trilogy. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Book One of the trilogy, won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. The Ask and The Answer, the second book in the trilogy won the Costa Children's Book Award 2009. The third book, Monsters of Men, is released in September 2010.

He has also written a novel (The Crash of Hennington) and a short story collection (Topics About Which I Know Nothing) for adults, has taught Creative Writing at Oxford University, and is a literary critic for the Guardian. Born in Virginia, he lives in London.