The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Chaos Walking, #1)

by Patrick Ness

Pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron, young Todd and Viola set out across New World searching for answers about his colony's true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing hopeful settlers from Old World.

Reviewed by boghunden on

2 of 5 stars

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I'm not entirely sure why, but I didn't like this book.

It started out fine, I liked the writing, the setting and the characters. Then something happened that changed the whole thing for me Todd chose Viola's life over Manchee's. He'd known Viola for a week, tops! No, I wasn't satisfied with that choice.

The writing style is very unique, it's filled with accents and it made the dialogue come to life in my mind. In the beginning, it was a bit annoying, but that was just until I'd gotten used to it.

The plot, well...it's hard to say much without spoiling, but as I said, I liked the beginning. The middle was okay until the above spoiler happened, and then it just went straight down hill. It dragged, there was nothing going on but a lot of thoughts and talking and yeah, basically I just got tired with nothing really happening.

The characters, well, I liked Todd until..yeah, you guessed it, until the above spoiler thing happened. To me, he didn't feel like a 12 year old boy, he felt like a young man, about 16 or so. That was nice. The lack of love in this book was refreshing as well. It was just a boy and a girl trying to survive, and I really liked that part.
I have to mention the dog, Manchee. He and Todd was a great team!

Overall it was an okay book, it was just about 100 pages too long and the spoiler thing shouldn't have happened - it made Todd seem rather desperate and pathetic to me.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 9 November, 2014: Finished reading
  • 9 November, 2014: Reviewed