The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking, Book 1 Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B0044X7444 | Format: PDF
The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking, Book 1 Description
Prentisstown isn't like other towns. Everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts in an overwhelming, never-ending stream of Noise. Just a month away from the birthday that will make him a man, Todd and his dog, Manchee - whose thoughts Todd can hear, too, whether he wants to or not -stumble upon an area of complete silence. They find that in a town where privacy is impossible, something terrible has been hidden - a secret so awful that Todd and Manchee must run for their lives. But how do you escape when your pursuers can hear your every thought?
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 55 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Candlewick on Brilliance Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 28, 2010
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0044X7444
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.
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.
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