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

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

After all dystopian stories, that I read recently, where the narrator was a female, I had a great desire for a change and decided to reach for the story through the eyes of the opposite sex. I hesitated a long time before buying this book (not much opinion on the Polish book side), but I took a chance... and it paid off!

The narrator is a 13-year-old Todd, who is 'almost' a man and is one of the colonists in the New World. He lives in the settlement, called Prentisstown, along with about 150 other men. Prentisstown is the only settlement in the New World, and the men who live there are the last people (at least that we find out at the beginning). At New World people were at war with Spackles, creatures covered with moss, which infected people, all women dead, and men since then, whether they want or don’t, hear each other's thoughts (called 'Noise'), they hear even the thought of animals.

The boy doesn’t live there lightly. Everything changes when Todd finds at the swamps girl, who despite the fact that it’s a girl - extinct species, she has no Noise. His whole life changes radically, he has to run, armed with a knife, with his dog Manchee and a girl, can rely only on themselves, looking for answers about what this is all about. Is whole Todd’s life in Prentisstown was one big lie? What is the truth about the New World?

The whole action really addictive, nothing in this book is 100% clear, the author doesn’t show anything right away. It happens a lot and quickly, it’s about killing and dilemmas in this connection, it’s about hope, the whole gamut of emotions from laughter, through fear, after despair and tears went through me like a tornado.

Language of the book was, at least in the beginning, bit weird, chaotic, a lot of lengthy sentences, rather imaginatively constructed. There was a lot repetitions and direct returns to the reader. All this could be annoying, but at some moment I realized that it wasn’t, and that this is the advantage of this book, adding uniqueness, originality and dynamism of all events, and finally the narrator is 13-year-old boy, who spent all his life overwhelmed with thoughts of others, who couldn’t even read and write. Thanks to this all the events were very reliable, sometimes I felt like I really took part in it, dialogues were very comfortable and the book absorbed me completely. Roughened narrative reminded me a little The Maze Runner combined with Shatter Me, but this book was published earlier than those items, I regret that only now in Poland.

Another plus was the end of each of the chapters in the right places, I want to finish reading, and here comes a twist and... end of the chapter, and every time I say to myself: "another one". And in this way definitely too quickly it all ended.

And ending was great, surprising and moving...

I personally cann’t wait for the next part, in Poland soon.

"The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say. About anything."

This is the first sentence of the book. It's a somewhat strange start to a very strange book. Set in a world where men's thoughts are available for anyone to hear the main character, Todd, is in for a crazy adventure. He is sent away from the only village he's ever known to warn the rest of the planet about something he doesn't even know. He meets the first girl he's ever seen, blows things up, loses people he cares deeply about and learns a little bit about himself.

At first I thought this book was going to be long and boring. It took a while to get going and is written in such a hard dialect that I almost didn't give it the chance it deserved. But by the end I was hooked. Todd and his girl are both compelling characters, the villains are truly terrifying and the world both alien and familiar at the same time.

If you like science fiction, dystopia or coming of age epics then this may be the book for you. I'm not sure but I think it's young adult but I've never let that stop me in the past. I think it will appeal to both boys and girls and highly recommend it.