Review Detail

It took me a while to warm up to this book—about 100 pages or so. That’s rather a long time, though since the book itself was nearly 500 pages, it wasn’t too bad. But once things started happening (the first 100 pages cover a 6-hour period or so), then it was practically impossible to put this book down.

The travels of Todd, Viola and the talking dog Manchee were wholly engrossing. This book is very much an escapist read, I think. It’s the kind of book you read when you don’t want to think about everything else. In spite of its length, The Knife of Never Letting Go is full of action and new experiences, and I definitely don’t think it ever dragged.

Aside from its rough start, my big complaint was how Todd would fight a bad guy, leave him for dead, and then that same bad guy would pop up again in about 20 pages. It happened over and over and over and over again. Somewhat annoying, to be honest. (Note after the fact: this is Patrick Ness’s weakness throughout the series—nobody who died stayed dead.)