Booklog 33/2025: Patrick Ness: The Knife of Never Letting Go – Chaos Walking #1

[jacey]

Narrated by Humphrey Bower

In Prentisstown there are no women, and all men leak thoughts involuntarily all the time. It’s known as noise, and is a feature of this planet with what appears to be a failing human colony. Todd, almost but not quite a man until his upcoming birthday, is in the swamp with his talking dog Manchee, when he finds a crashed scout ship and a girl whose parents have been killed. Thus starts the story of a boy’s journey to manhood. Todd has been deliberately kept innocent of some terrible facts, and misinformed about others. Why did the women die, and what happened in the war against the spackle, the planet’s indigenous beings? Answers to these questions are hard-won as Todd ends up fleeing with the girl, Viola, pursued by Mayor Prentiss. It seems as though Todd and Viola can’t catch a break as they run from danger headlong into trouble. This is well read by Humphrey Bower who differentiates between the characters with a selection of voices and accents which are pitch perfect. I’m only disappointed that it has a cliffhanger ending – and I’ve said in other reviews how much I hate those. In this case it worked because I moved straight on to the next book.

Comments

[heleninwales]

I read the Chaos Walking trilogy when I was doing the OU course on Children's Literature. The third book won the Carnegie prize that year and so one option (and the one I liked best) for the final assignment was about that book. However, realising that you can't really appreciate book 3 if you have no idea what happened in the first two books, I skim read at breakneck speed. As a result, I can't remember much about any of them, but I got a decent mark for the assignment.

[jacey]

I'm listening to the third book now. I think reading all three together is a bonus because they all carry directly on from each other.