Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you read the Amazon reviews of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO you will see many 5-star ratings from readers and only a few 1 and 2-star ratings. I am in the 1-star camp and let me tell you why: If you read the 5-star reviewers, you will see that many of these folks reacted to Patrick Ness writing which, in it's essence, is very creative and skillful. He knows how to write an economical sentence and sketch in a character. He is not afraid to try fresh and daring constructions of words on the page. His presentation of telepathy is original, interesting, and very well handled so that you do believe: "Yes this is what if would be like if you could hear everyone's thoughts." So I can understand many readers being hooked. But even among the 5-star reviewers you find people who say: "I loved and hated this book." Let's look at why you might hate it: Where Ness fails almost completely is as a storyteller. Rather than taking the time to construct authentically believable dramatic situations, Ness seems to think that the shortest path to drama is violence. The beatings start on page 6 and are followed by stabbings, shootings, kickings, guns, knives, machetes, maiming and gruesome killings. When the plot of endless pursuit on a frontier planet called New World slows down, it usually offers a brutal scene of struggle & capture. I am not a reader who objects to violence, but I do object when it is pointless and offered in place of a story. This random violence is not drama -- it is melodrama and a shameless manipulation to jerk the readers emotions around. You know it's melodrama for one simple reason: the bad guys NEVER have a problem finding our protagonists and tormenting them. Any logic would tell you that on a sparsely populated frontier planet it might be hard to find two people who are hiding. Nope. Not here. Even the bad guys can hardly believe it when they catch the young runaways (again) and say: "Yer taking the ROAD?! You ain't even going OFF TRAIL?" Ness succeeds in his melodrama superbly, and you can see that success in reader's reactions who are emotionally moved by the book. But an emotional reaction to this book is not enough to make it good fiction. You get an emotional reaction from one of the SAW movies when someone is being tortured, but it's hard to argue torture has merit as artistic expression. THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO has won a few literary prizes. Rather than an endorsement of the excellence of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, I see this as an indication of the lack of perspective among the judges, who no doubt found the merits of this work to exceed it's failings. Perhaps the over-violent failings of Ness can best be understood by looking at two other award-winning writers, Mark Twain and Cormac McCarthy. All three of these writers have written multiple books about "youth on the frontier." Mark Twain, writing in the 1870's sets up the plot of THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER with one murder, that's all he needs to set a timeless classic in motion. ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1885) bears some strong similarities to THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO. Both offer vernacular language, local customs, religion, being "on the run," and the search for freedom and identity. HUCKLEBERRY FINN is not without violence. There are corpses uncovered, blood feuds, and threatened lynchings. But the overall level of violence in Twain's classic novels is far less than in Ness's melodrama. That's because Twain understood it was characters that drove the story. If the characters were good enough, you don't need somebody stabbed every two pages to hold the reader's interest. Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed BLOOD MERIDIAN (1985) is not a young adult novel, but it offers the same kind of teenage frontier protagonist. Ness's "Todd Hewitt" is McCarthy's "the kid." BLOOD MERIDIAN is worth noting because it is much more violent than THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO. In fact BLOOD MERIDIAN may well be the most violent book I have ever read, which is not surprising when the basic plot is: a teenage kid joins a murderous gang of scalp hunters who massacre indians. The violence in BLOOD MERIDIAN was not missed by critics: Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the best 20th century American novels, describing it as "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick," but admitted that he found the book's pervasive violence so distasteful that he had several false starts before reading the book entirely. James Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions... In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else." The point here is McCarthy never used violence for melodrama and cheap emotional effect -- Ness, that's his whole game plan. Is there anything "wrong" with melodrama? Not really. And It's possible the amped-up violence of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO is just a reaction to the times we live in, where video-game violence brings sky-high body counts and much of the entertainment media aimed at youth culture offers casual murder. But we are in sad shape as readers if we become so desperate for stimulation that violence is a catch-all solution for boredom, thought, art and beauty. Are you bored reading this? Just kill something.