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The Knife of Never Letting Go by Parick Ness

THE FIRST THING you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got much to say. About anything.

"Need a poo, Todd."

"Shut up, Manchee."

"Poo. Poo, Todd."

"I said shut it."

The Knife of Never Letting Go is a brutal, traumatizing, sci-fi YA novel about a boy named Todd Hewitt (cannot be forgotten, his name is screamed throughout the story) who is the last boy in the settlement of Prentisstown, New Planet. Over 20 years ago, a group of believers left their old planet and sailed off in their spaceships in search for a simpler, more peaceful, less communicative way of life. What they found was a planet where everyone can hear each other's Noise, including the animals.

The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.

In Prentisstown, all of the women are now dead because of this germ. Todd is a month away from becoming a man on his 13th birthday when everything he knows to be truth starts to unravel and he must suddenly flee Prentisstown and the men who are pursuing him.

The book is set up from the perspective of Todd's Noise (or at least one strand of it) and so much of it is one long rolling run on sentence. Reading was also banned in Prentisstown, books were burned, and so of course Todd has had a very limited education. He is illiterate and several words are misspelled in Todd's Noise to emphasize this. At first, this all bothered me, but as I fell deeper and deeper into Todd's world, I saw the absolute beauty in his Noise, and in Ness's writing.

It's like the song of a family where everything's always all right, it's a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it's a song that'll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that's broken, it fixes.

Todd's journey to becoming a man is more difficult than the average human ever endures.

Doing what's right should be easy.

It shouldn't be just another big mess like everything else.

___

Life equals running and when we stop running maybe that's how we'll know life is finally finished.

___

Maybe there really is hope at the end of the road.

I love this book and am disappointed in it all at the same time. It has a lot of the aspects of dystopian fiction that I love and hints of Ray Bradbury, but there are moments when I lost all respect for the main character Todd and moments when I couldn't keep reading, my eyes were too blurry with tears. And, worst of all, the story doesn't end. It stops on a cliffhanger and is picked up in the second book of the series The Ask and the Answer.

This book is not, not, not for children to read. The worst of the worst language is in it as well as violence and brutal savagery. Despite that, this book is so so good and highly recommended.