I have read a multitude of different YA dystopian novels but these are the first ones that truly resonated with me. Felt like so much more than your average teenage book.
Todd Hewitt lives on a farm with his fathers, Cillian and Ben, with noise in his head. Noise in all the heads of all the men in town. A town with only men and their noise. His life, to him, however is completely ordinary until he meets a girl and she has no noise and is being hunted.
It's been a while since I read the Knife of Never Letting Go so my explanation is poor but honestly, it took me so long to get to the end because I never wanted to finish. Evangeline Lilly was somewhat vilified by LOTR fans for admitting that she never read the end of the Return of the King because she never wanted to the stories to close. I can relate where these were concerned.
Patrick Ness has this power of creating empathy within the reader; you may not know what they are going through directly but by the end, you feel like you have been on the journey with them all the way. By giving animals a voice, he makes them 'human' in a way where we can love them as three dimensional characters that when they come to harm, we fear, mourn, cry and care for them as we would the human protagonists.
But he also gives the antagonists a soul. He gives them something so unerringly human that we cannot help but feel bad for them. They might make poor choices and we might hate them for the dangers they create but when it comes to the end, we long for them as part of the story as much as the others. I hated the main villain right until the final curtain but when you were told why and you felt why he made the calls he made and why he chose the path, you felt sorry for him.
Within this magical world, Ness creates believable emotional connections that are not forced. They do not take over the story or become the be-all-and-all. You know from moment one that Todd and Viola will be romantically involved but it is organic, it is real and it is slow. It does not take over the story, it does not overwhelm the power of the war tale being told but it is there, forever in the background that without it, the story would be less somehow. Despite the fact that it isn't front and centre.
The relationships are part of what make the book so powerful. The love between father and son, between boy and his pets, between boy and girl, between boy and megalomaniac. It is, at its core, a story of the complications of love and caring set on top of a mad war story between fantastical creatures and crazy bastards. It is about making things personal when you need to be disconnected; something you could say about the reader. We become so much a part of the world that when it crumbles, you grieve.
The relationships are part of what make the book so powerful. The love between father and son, between boy and his pets, between boy and girl, between boy and megalomaniac. It is, at its core, a story of the complications of love and caring set on top of a mad war story between fantastical creatures and crazy bastards. It is about making things personal when you need to be disconnected; something you could say about the reader. We become so much a part of the world that when it crumbles, you grieve.
Ness is not afraid of his young adult title either. He wears it like a badge of pride, toeing the line between too much and not enough. Don't get attached to characters because they may not make it to the end. He makes those important decisions other authors are afraid of to show us the human choices that must be made. He creates an extraordinary, fantasy world only to fill it with the ordinary and mundane. That is not a problem. It does not talk down to its readers, it makes them better by showing us what must be done, fantasy or not. War can destroy, it can drive you mad, it can pull apart forever love and it can kill even on a perfect new world.
