#'i love my comfort series' she said clutching books about kids expriencing horrors and getting traumatized on the terrible tragedy planet

[if-one-of-us-falls]

reverse unpopular opinion meme abt the knife of never letting gooo specifically the first book. or you know what pick any one of the three books

We're going to be here a while 😅

The Knife of Never Letting Go was a revolutionary book for me in many ways. I read it for the first time when I was 12, and ten years later at 22 I still love it just as much, and still feel the influence it had on my tastes and standards in media and on my own writing.

These are the reasons I come up with when I try to break down why it had such a lasting effect:

1. It's incredibly gripping.

I remember picking it up at a convention, spending the rest of that con reading it on the stairs, almost missing the train home because I was reading it on the floor of the platform, getting home and reading until I cried myself to sleep after that scene, then reaching for the book as soon as I woke up. No book has ever gripped me this way. The book that came the closest at this point was The Hunger Games, but Chaos Walking felt like a whole different level. The Ask and the Answer was the first book I ever read in English, because I couldn't bear waiting for the translation.

Knife is so un-put-down-able for 2 main reasons: the writing style, which I'll cover next, and the perfectly paced plot. It's cliffhanger after cliffhanger but never in a cheap way. Todd never gets a break and neither does the reader, and that makes the few quiet moments even more powerful. This relentless plot structure that literally never stops running works because with all of Todd's faults, you can't help but sympathise and become emotionally invested in him. He is just as confused and overwhelmed as you are.

2. The writing style is so unique

A lot of people say it took them some time to get used to the writing style, and I get why, but for me it was love at first sight.

Patrick Ness intentionally and masterfully broke every rule he could. By doing that, he tailored the perfect writing voice for the character and story he was trying to tell. It's chaos and it's poetry. It's a big overwhelming mess but every coma is exactly where it's supposed to be. I still get blown away by how beautiful the writing is in every reread I do.

The... Creative use of different fonts looks like a gimmick at first glance, but it conveys the concept of Noise very effectively. And I love the way Ness uses em-dashes —

And keeps using them —

And uses them until you're out of breath—

(and even parentheses sometimes.)

(shut up.)

It's like he invented a whole new language designed to keep you exactly in pace with Todd's consciousness as he experiences the story. It's an amplified version of the first person present tense that was so popular in YA when Knife came out, utilised to the maximum.

This sense of immediacy in conjunction with Todd's voice, complete with the intentionally misspelled words and the simplicity and honesty of the way he speaks and thinks, and the layers of vulnerability that show through his facade of trying to be a "man" — I don't think I've ever read a book that accomplishes so much just with prose. I feel like I could study it forever.

3. This book gets what it's like to be a teenager.

Or a young person, for that matter. It's about discovering the horrors of the world, and the good of it. It's about finding out there's more to the picture than the little bubble you grew up in lead you to believe and how hard it is to accept and how vulnerable and overwhelmed and watched it makes you feel. It's about feeling everything all the time even when you just want to disappear and stop caring.

It's about the power of caring anyway.

4. It doesn't shy away from complexity

No one is completely innocent, not even the "good guys", not even Todd. There are consequences to being raised with hateful ideology and toxic masculinity shoved at you from every direction, and the book is not afraid to show it.

5. Todd

Despite all of it, Todd is a character I just can't help but to love. He has his problems, but in his core he is a good person. He was raised with kindness in a place where kindness is a weakness. He is naive, overwhelmed, rude, sometimes selfish, but deep inside he cares and wants to do the right thing. He makes mistakes. He makes choices that are stupid and mislead and brave and kind and cowardly. He is so, so human. And he is one of my favorite characters of all time.

6. Themes ahead of its time

I feel like I could keep babbling forever but these are the main points of why I think Chaos Walking is incredible and everyone should read it. Sorry for the long post but tbh I can't talk about this series without turning it into an essay 😅 thanks for giving me an excuse to gush! 💜

Maybe I was just a little under-read, but at least for me Knife and all of Chaos Walking were the first books I read that tackled these themes so head on, especially in YA: toxic masculinity, misogyny, the dangers of the overload of unfiltered information (that's a big one. The internet today resembles the Noise even more than it did back in 2008), propaganda and herd behaviour and how it drives ordinary people to commit atrocities. I'm sure other books addressed these issues, but Knife does so in an unflinching way without resorting to mere shock value. It deals very well with complex, painful, sensitive issues. Especially for a YA book.