Book Review

Book: Chaos Walking Book 1: The Knife of Never Letting Go

• Author: Patrick Ness

• Publishing City and State: Somerville, Massachusetts

• Publisher: Candlewick Press

• Copyright: 2008

• 479 pages

The Knife of Never Letting Go is a fictional novel created by Patrick Ness. The setting is on a newfound planet where only a couple of thousand of settlers live. It is written in the time of the future where planets are being discovered, space travel is possible, campfires are made by a push of a button on a high-tech box, and band-aids are humans' skin tissue. Though, aside from these inventions, you get a sense of it being set in the older days because in the town that's the focus of the book, hardly anyone could read or write, there are no schools, there are no cars, and most men made their incomes by farming. An overview of the book is as follows: settlers catch a new disease upon arriving to a new planet. The disease makes all animals able to talk and gives everyone the ability to hear every male's thoughts that have the disease (which is every male on the new planet). Prentisstown (the main town mentioned in the book) has no females in it and Todd, the main character, runs into a lot of trouble finding out why.

The two main characters of the book are Todd Hewitt and Viola Eden. The book is written using Todd's voice. Todd is the only male who hasn't reached manhood in Prentisstown and won't reach manhood for another month. Todd is usually always complains about something. In the book, the main things he complains about are not wanting his dog he got for his last birthday, always having to help on the farm, and Cillian (one of his guardians) being too strict on him. He's careless and doesn't listen to rules. He swears all the time even though he's supposed to be a very decent young man. He's pretty scrawny and not too educated. He can't read big words and his spelling is ridiculously bad at spelling. Viola is around Todd's age. She's...