I liked that Todd’s dialect then became not just a writing gimmick, but more of a cultural stance. Interestingly, Todd later meets a character whose pronunciation is more conventional, and when that character tries to correct Todd’s grammar, Todd gets very defensive. That being said, about a third of the way through, I hardly even noticed it anymore, which I guess means the book really did suck me in completely. “stayshun” instead of “station”) really bugged me, and I think it’s because I’d imagined this narrative to be primarily oral (Todd is literally telling his story) and I don’t hear enough of a difference to justify that particular misspell. For some reason, “-tion” spelled “-shun” (e.g. I normally don’t mind deliberate misspellings as long as the purpose is clear and consistent, and I was fine with a lot of it in Knife (e.g. Todd speaks in a rough dialect, and Ness expresses this through his spelling. Faced with the visual representation of this chaos, we can feel the desperation in Todd’s constant repetition of the mantra “I am Todd Hewitt.” Patrick Ness uses this sparingly – most of the time, he focuses on a particular character’s Noise, signified by a different font – and when he does, we are just sucked into the chaos that Todd must endure every day. I’m usually a big fan of e-reading, but the image of Noise contained within the mechanical boundaries of the e-reader screen just does not compare to the splash of words words words practically spilling over the edge of the page. I especially love the scenes where the book describes the Noise – the overlapping lines of text in varying fonts are a veritable cacophony. Knife is a powerful book, especially because we’re thrust right into Todd’s perspective. Turns out that a lot of what Todd believes is actually a lie, and Prentisstown has a terrible secret in its past, and the Mayor is pulling out all the stops to bring Todd back. When Todd’s adoptive fathers Ben and Cillian find out about it, they pack Todd some food and his mother’s journal and order him to take Manchee and get as far from Prentisstown as possible. The only remaining boy in a town of men, Todd Hewitt is a month away from his thirteenth birthday and officially becoming an adult when he and his dog Manchee encounter an odd pocket of Quiet near a river. That’s how it is in Prentisstown, where all the female settlers are dead and the Noise virus has left the males with the ability to hear each other’s thoughts and the thoughts of animals. You can’t shut it off, it’s an endless barrage of Noise, and most of what you hear are thoughts of pain and grief. Imagine a world where you can hear what everyone else is thinking, and they can hear everything you are thinking.

The knife of never letting go goodreads