Full of ideas, pushes the genre in all the right directions-but dragged down by some clunky, clunky narration.

At this rate, I’ll never get around to reviewing Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (in short, it’s splendid), but I figure that a book popular enough to be sold at WalMart doesn’t need my help.  But say you (or a student) have already read The Hunger Games and Catching Fire and you need something to hold you over until the third book comes out.   Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking series, which begins with The Knife of Never Letting Go, might just fill that gap.

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown, a small village on a distant and isolate colony world-the last baby born before an alien bioweapon killed the women and left the men open to the Noise-the uncontrollable, subconscious psychic projections of every creature on New World.  Infected by the Noise, the men of Prentisstown constantly project their own thoughts to the world-and there is no place to hide..  Todd has grown up listening to the private thoughts and idle fantasies of everyone surrounding him, and unable to keep any secrets of his own.  Until, one day, he finds a hole in that noise-and at the centre of that hole, a person…a person with no Noise of her own.

This is real science fiction-the kind where the fantastic conceit is used to talk about sexism, about colonialism, about that horrifying stage of adolescence when you feel like everyone can see right through you-without distracting from the harrowing chases and knife fights.

Todd narrates the novel in a first-person stream of consciousness.  Noise is typically shown in a rough, jagged font that occasionally overlaps itself, spills into the margins and drifts off the page.  Todd is a distinctly odd narrator-he speaks in a thick dialect (with the occasional word transcribed phonetically) and, having grown up in a world where thoughts are never hidden, cannot read faces and often glosses over things that would be obvious to him.  When the narration works, it helps create a sense that Todd and his world are strange, alien, and dangerous.  When it doesn’t work, it feels like the author is hiding things that the audience should know as a building suspense-inauthentic and cheap.  I think that the use of viewpoint improves throughout the series, but the tricky narration might keep some readers from really connecting with the story.

Chaos Walking isn’t as tightly polished as The Hunger Games, or as easy to pick up, but genre fans should check it out.  A lot of science fiction over-explains its themes-but in The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness has presented some really powerful ideas and simply let them be.

Grade Level:  This is a book more or less designed to break readability equations.  An excerpt and the formula produces a level of 5.8.  In reality, the dialect, stream of consciousness, and unusual vocabulary make it significantly more challenging.

Rating (out of five):  ★★★★ for Genre Fans, ★★★ for everyone else