Due to the AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!-factor of the cliffhanger ending, it's
almost impossible to read The Knife of Never Letting Go without reading
the next book in the Chaos Walking series.
So the moment I finished Knife,
I borrowed The Ask and The Answer from the library. The second book also has a cliffhanger
ending, but unlike the first, it's not scream inducing. It was the un-put-downable quality of the writing
that had me diving straight from Ask into
Monsters of Men.
It's difficult to give an overview of Chaos Walking without spoilers, so I
won't say too much about the story, just that on New World men can hear each
other's thoughts and there are no women (or are there?).
One day Todd discovers a hole in the noise and is forced to run for his
life from the men of the town he grew up in.
If you like dystopian novels, this is dystopia at its best. It's an ugly and violent world that Todd
lives in, and the body-count is high. If you don't like that sort of
thing, these are not the books for you.
What I love the most about Chaos Walking is the characters’ voices. Each character, indeed each animal, has its
own distinct way of speaking and thinking.
I also love the ambiguity of many of the characters, particularly in the
second book where Todd and Viola just don't know who they can trust outside of
each other. It creates non-stop tension
and conflict: the essence of a great story.
Patrick Ness is fast become one of my all time favourite writers.
Her accent’s funny, different from mine, different from anyone in
Prentisstown’s. Her lips make different
kinds of outlines for the letters, like they’re swooping down on them from
above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they’re
sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind. – Patrick Ness, The Knife of
Never Letting Go
