Apparently, creating a Pinterest board for all of my 5-star books leads to writing lots of reviews. Here’s another.
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Love great writing? Read it.
Love a great plot? Read it.
Love stylized writing? Read it.
Love action? Read it.
Love suspense? Read it.
Love science fiction? Read it.
Hate science fiction, but love dystopian books? Read it.
Basically, just read it.
It’s hard to talk about without ruining it.
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Wait, you’re still there? You want to know what HAPPENS? Well, fine. I’ll try to share something, spoiler-free.
The narrator is a teenage boy. He is the youngest of 146 men in Prentisstown, on a colony planet.
His world is loud: every thought of every creature and all the men can be heard. Walking through town can give you a headache.
They are all that is left on the planet, having killed off the native aliens (Spackle) and lost their women (his ma included) to disease in the war.
That’s just the beginning, though. Something happens that unravels his world, and he is sent off on a journey he could never have imagined. At every turn, it appears that some fact is not as it had seemed…
The epic journey at the center of this book rivals many others, but the speed and danger of it – combined with Ness’s pitch-perfect writing – reminds me most of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
Ness, however, is much much more YA friendly, and his plot hooks you and drags you along bleeding and gasping behind it through every artful page.
The Nerdy Book Club
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Oh man, you even TOLD ME SPECIFICALLY to read Patrick Ness and I haven’t done it yet. Well, that will be corrected soooooon-o.
You will not be disappointed. (And, I thought of him when I was just reading your FAN-FRIGGIN-TASTIC mythology post – yeah, this one http://prolificnovelista.com/2012/the-5-rules-of-building-believable-mythology/.)