The Knife of Never Letting Go

Author: Patrick Ness

Publisher: Walker Books

Publication Year: 2008

Most of the readers will be: Late middle school and early high school boys and girls.

Reader's advisory: Try Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles for short stories that take place on a recently colonized Mars.

Summary:
Todd Hewitt has grown up in Prentisstown, the only surviving colony on New World. During a war with the local aliens, called Spackle, the aliens infected the animals with a germ that made them all start talking, and infected the humans with a germ that made all their thoughts heard. The Noise germ drove people crazy. It killed half the men and all the women.
In Prentisstown, a boy becomes a man at thirteen. Todd is the last boy in Prentisstown and he is one month away from his thirteenth birthday. His parents both died from the Noise germ and he lives with friends of theirs, Ben and Cillian.
When he and his dog Manchee go into the swamp one morning to gather apples Todd comes across something he has never experienced before. Quiet. There is a quiet spot in the swamp and it isn't natural. Todd tries to keep the quiet out of his Noise as he walks back through town, but somehow it escapes.
Now Todd is running. Because he and that quiet both mean something to Prentisstown, and the men don't want either of them to get away.

My favorite passage:

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say.
About anything.
"Need a poo, Todd."
"Shut up, Manchee."
"Poo. Poo, Todd."
"I said shut it."
We're walking across the wild fields south-east of town, those ones that slope down to the river and head on towards the swamp. Ben's sent me to pick him some swamp apples and he's made me take Manchee with me, even tho we all know Cillian only bought him to stay on Mayor Prentiss's good side and so suddenly here's this brand new dog as a present for my birthday last year when I never said I wanted any dog, that what I said I wanted was for Cillian to finally fix the fissionbike so I wouldn't have to walk every forsaken place in this stupid town, but oh, no, happy birthday, Todd, here's a brand new puppy, Todd, and even tho you don't want him, even tho you never asked for him, guess who has to feed him and train him and wash him and take him for walks and listen to him jabber now that he's got old enough for the talking germ to set his mouth moving? Guess who?
"Poo," Manchee barks quietly to himself. "Poo, poo, poo."
"Just have yer stupid poo and quit yapping about it." (pg 3-4)

What I really think:
I'm kind of obsessed with this book. I'm kind of upset that the next Chaos Walking book isn't coming out until May. I don't want to say too much about it and I couldn't really share a passage except from the very beginning because it's full of questions and finding out the answers is part of the fun. I wish I could say you have all the answers by the end. But you don't. I suppose that's why book two is called The Ask and the Answer.
What can I tell you? This novel experiments with how different people, and different groups of people, handle situations they never imagined they would be in. How Right and Wrong get all mixed up and you can still do what's Right when everyone else is doing Wrong, but it is easy to see how so many people get involved in doing Wrong.
At one point, a character says that Noise is just information and too much information is a bad thing. I would never call this novel an allegory for our "information age," but it is not unlikely that Ness is making a passing comment on our current overabundance of information. Just remember that the cure for too much information is a good librarian to help you sort through it. ;)