The Knife of Never Letting Go

How would you function if, as a result of germ warfare, everyone could read your thoughts, and you could read everyone else's?  Oh, and that includes animals, such as your unwanted pet dog who can be very preoccupied with his bodily functions.  And you are the last boy, bored and isolated, in a town full of increasingly grim men and you are less than a month away from your 13th birthday, a birthday in which you will undergo the strange secret initiation that will finally turn you into a man. But then you accidently discover something that changes everything and everyone...and you must run.

The Knife of Never Letting Go is not a book to read if you are having trouble getting to sleep…actually it's a book to read if you are having trouble staying awake .  In fact, reading this book is the equivalent of a experiencing the effects of highly caffeinated beverage consumed while blindfolded on a skateboard headed down an icy covered hill accompanied by a sound track that alternates between heavy metal music, static, and silence.  I read this book months ago, and at first couldn't remember if it was a movie or a book; the images were that vivid.

The author, Patrick Ness, has commented that the story was influenced in part by both the eroding sense of privacy in our world  and the explosion of information available to everyone.  He's interested in how we filter though it, but also what would happen if the filters were suddenly removed.  What are your feelings on this?

How would you cope?  This is a book packed with action, but also with ideas.  What struck you about it?

Comments

[Rebecca]

Just finished it & was disappointed it left so much unresolved at the end (sequel coming), but it WAS a gripping read! The description of Haven (as a sort of Heaven) was interesting & I thought of Twitter as a sort of unfiltered reading of people's minds--do we really want to know that much? The dog's talking was great, too--pretty believable that that is what a dog would say. Can't quite forgive the author for leaving us with such a cliffhanger, though. (end of a book should have some kind of resolution, even if there is a sequel.)

[Dawn Foster]

Haven't read this yet; sounds a tad like M.T. Anderson's "Feed" though .... you might be interested in reading that one.

[Ruth]

After reading *The Knife of Never Letting Go*, I was struck by how tenaciously the book itself refused to let me go. I thought about it long after I finished the first page, and found so much worth thinking about and discussing. I found the issues of power and dominance as they related to men and women very thought-provoking, believable and scary. I LOVED the dog so much, too. On the jacket I read, someone had commented that this was the best dog in literature. I agree.

I too was sort of angry at the ending, but that's also a measure of how much I enjoyed it. I just don't want to wait too long for a satisfying resolution.

This is a great book!

[Toni S]

I really appreciated your insights, Ruth and Rebecca, and I agree with you about the maddening ending. There is so much substance in the book, almost a gluttony of food for thought, that the ending almost seems unworthy of the writing that went before it. Yet it kind of fits in a strange way. I think that we as readers are so viscerally involved with Todd's constant struggle for survival and reframing of reality, that ending at the pinnacle of uncertainty makes us really get into his skin. Someone once told me that the mark of a good book is that you have lots of questions and curiosity left when you are finished reading it, and my questions on this book just keep multiplying. I wonder about the hypnotic hold that Mayor Prentiss has on men, and I'm curious about the religious worldview of original colonists--can we find equivalents today? Also I have to mention that I just love the way the author portrays the conscious thought of animals, particularly the herd of "thangs." I also want to know more about the Spackles. But my biggest question is, what do you think would happen in our culture if we were subjected to a "virus" that revealed men's but not women's thoughts?

[Jacqueline]

At first I thought that this book was a little weird, but I was willing to try it out. Im soo glad I read it. It makes you have a different viewpoint on the world. It would be very different to live in a world where everybody could hear your thoughts and you could hear the buzz of everybody elses thoughts around you. Hearing the thoughts of animals would be very interesting though. I really loved the dog and how he played a big part in how the story has turned out so far.

I was also dissapointed in the ending but the author had to make it end with lots of questions for people to want to keep reading the series. Well anyway I thought this book was a really good read even for me who doesn't usually read these types of books. :)

[Deidre K. Bradford]

The Knife of Never Letting Go is definitely a book that makes people think about all the "noise" we have in our world. I also thought the religious undertones of the "New World" were interesting, especially to our Puritan-based country. I wasn't enthralled with the book and probably wouldn't have read another one of his works, but since he left such a cliffhanger at the end, I'll probably read the next one just to satisfy my need for answers. I agree with previous posts about the dog - I cried when Manchee died, and I thoroughly enjoyed is very dog-like thoughts and actions.