The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

09:34 Unknown 0 Comments

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don’t remember nothing, don’t remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before i was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone’s ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it’s true but who knows?
I am the youngest of the whole town, tho. I used to come out and throw rocks at field crows with Reg Oliver (seven months and eight days older) and Liam Smith (four months and 29 days older) and Seb Mundy who was next to youngest to me, three months and a day older, but even he don’t talk to me no more now that he’s a man. 
No boys do once they turn thirteen. (page 9)



This book is an emotional rollercoaster. I’ll put that out there as a disclaimer. I picked it up after seeing it mentioned in book tuber videos and on Tumblr, not thinking too highly for it. However I am now 100% sure that Patrick Ness has just become one of my new favourite authors. 

The novel is based around the character of Todd Hewitt who has grown up in a place called Prentisstown, in the New World. Essentially a group of settlers moved to the new world as part of some religious movement as far as my brain can comprehend although really the only link to religion is Aaron, the incredibly creepy and terrifying to picture, preacher. In the new world there is something called the Noise which means that you can hear everyone’s thoughts, be that the thoughts of the men in the town, to those of sheep who pretty much only say “Sheep”. However Todd’s world ends up turned up on it’s head when he finds a small patch of silence in the swamp near his home. He finds a girl. This doesn’t sound weird… but there are no other women in Prentisstown. 

This novel confused me to begin with. Ness’ choice of spellings really made me focus on what I was reading. It also makes perfect sense. In a first person novel where the narrator is uneducated, the spellings should be inconsistent and incorrect. It didn’t quite click to begin with but throughout I found myself adjusting to this new way of reading and I found it really refreshing. It also links in with the unravelling that happens throughout this novel. There’s a lot of information that everyone else knows which we don’t learn until the very end and it means that we don’t learn what’s happened until Todd does. This makes Todd a really unreliable narrator which becomes really interesting to read. 

Most of the Noise is written in this beautiful script and really breaks up everything you're reading
When picking this book up, I thought that the knife would be metaphorical. It’s not but it is. It is so not a metaphor as it’s a physical object which becomes increasingly more important. But it acts as a metaphor in as much as we can relate to Todd not wanting to let go of what he knows to be true from his past, in many aspects making this a novel about Todd growing up. This is hinted at through Todd’s complete devotion to the 13 month calendar and his counting down the days until he is a man, at least once in every chapter. 

As far as the emotional rollercoaster goes it’s very tense. A lot of the time you spend hoping nothing bad will happen to the protagonists as you learn more and more things come out that you can piece together and you learn from the past experiences as the book progresses. There is no letting up. It’s a long old book but it passes quickly. Every event is so fluid and time feels rather irrelevant towards the end. Everything else in the world feels irrelevant by the end of the novel. 

Overall I am incredibly distraught I put myself on a book buying ban. The cliffhanger is hideous and I just want to know what happens next. I intend to plough through all I can in an attempt to get the next two books from the trilogy read before I go to university at the end of September. 

Total pages - 479
Total read time - Untimed (last 210 pages in around 2 hours)
Rating /10 - 8.5

Recommend - Yes (beware if you’re a lover of dogs)

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Elizabeth Is Missing - Emma Healey

07:33 Unknown 0 Comments

What was it I came for? The loaded shelves frown down at me as I circle them, and the blue and white linoleum stares up, dirty and cracked. My basket is empty, but i think I’ve been here for a while; Red is watching me. I read for something: it’s heavier than I was expecting and my arm is pulled down suddenly with the weight. It’s a tin of peach slices. That’ll do. I put a few more tins in my basket, tucking it’s handles into the crook of my arm. The thin metal bars grind against my hip on the way to the counter. 
“Are you sure this is what you’re after?” Reg asks. “Only you bought a lot of peach slices when you came in yesterday?”




Healey’s debut novel was not only a Sunday Times bestseller, but won the Costa book prize in 2014, and it is thoroughly deserved. I had seen this around Waterstones a few times on my shopping trips and had read that it was meant to be a wonderful book. So I picked it up a week or two ago, despite my fear of becoming forgetful myself, and today I finally got around to finishing it, 

Written in the first person, we see life through the eyes of Maud with early Alzheimer’s disease and she is determined that her best friend Elizabeth is missing. She has a not in her pocket that tells her so. This was something I felt made this such a deep book to read in so much as I had to keep coming back and forth between paragraphs a few times, rereading certain bits of information, just to make it clear in my head exactly what Maud had noted down for future reference. This also makes her a really unreliable narrator; which I found really refreshing. For Maud there is nothing really that she is 100% sure of. She even debates with herself as to whether Elizabeth is missing or not. 

Another really beautifully done element to this novel is the overlapping stories. Maud’s current life mixes with memories of her childhood after the second world war. We learn about her older sister also went missing and we hear about how as a child they searched for her and the information from that often trickles into her every day life, confusing her ideas about Elizabeth. Sometimes, in fact, I had to re read a page or two to work out what time period I was in, especially nearer the end, as Maud’s state of health declines. 

I think the other characters in this novel are less to be desired. I think my favourite of all of the secondary characters would have to be Katy, her granddaughter. There is a lovely moment of showing the differences between generations of people, where Katy calls Maud “a traitor to her generation” for not liking Vera Lynn. Katy’s mother Helen isn’t a bad character, I just feel like I didn’t get to know much about her. I know that she is particularly frustrated with her mother but other than that there were only brief moments of clarity showing her relationship with Maud and how they had grown up. 

This novel has a little bit of something for everyone I think. There’s not only crime and thriller elements but there are sections which are funny and bits that are sad; although for the first time I didn’t cry reading this contemporary novel. But really I think it shows family bonds and the strength of friendship, although I don’t advocate any of Maud’s actions throughout the book when trying to work out if you’re friends missing; I’d probably just leave that for the police. 

Total pages - 275
Total read time - 6 hours 
Rating /10 - 6

Recommend - Definitely if you have the time, if not leave it for a sunny/rainy/slightly cloudy day

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