It would be so easy to compile a long bullet point list of all the diverse things I love about it, yet drawing them together as Patrick Ness does is far harder. It is always difficult to write a good review of a book you love – the tendency to overuse hyperbole, bore the reader with irrelevance, or fail to view it all with a critical eye – but when that book is as multi faceted as The Knife of Never Letting Go it becomes doubly so. It combines the pace and excitement of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, the invention, intelligence of quality of writing of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and the moral ambiguity of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a frantic, hair-raising, terrifying, complex, heartbreaking novel.

While Todd, Manchee, and the girl flee across New World in search of safety and answers, the men of Prentisstown are preparing for war… And if that is the case, he is in danger. The silence of a girl.īut that is impossible. Then one day Todd and his dog Manchee stumble upon a hole in the Noise, a spot of absolute silence. And until he becomes a man there are secrets which the rest of the town is keeping from him. And everyone can hear everything that everyone else is thinking in a constant and never-ending stream of Noise. But Prentisstown is a town like no other. Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. Everything about it, even those parts I really wished weren’t there, contributed to one of the most rewarding and exciting reads I have had in months. The Knife of Never Letting Go may have cut me to the quick at times, but I still came away from it hungry for more. It is about promoting good health and that comes in many forms. Health is about so much more than simply avoiding trauma and ill health. Having swept through the first two thirds in a frenzy of enjoyment I was so traumatised that I threw the book across the room and had to be persuaded like a petulant toddler to pick it back up and finish. This book contains probably the most horrific event I have ever read.

A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.” A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don’t. “But a knife ain’t just a thing, is it? It’s a choice, it’s something you do. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The new world patrick ness