Jen reads... The Knife of Never Letting Go

I recently acquired a kindle, which have only recently started being sold in Japan. The good thing about this is that I can now buy books through the British amazon site, rather than having to buy books which are way too expensive from the Japanese site, or Japanese book shops. YAY! 

As books have been so expensive to buy here, and due to the generally limited space in Japanese apartments I've been trying to limit the amount of English books that I buy for the 3 years that I've been living here. So this is a very very good development for the amount of reading that I'm can do, AND a very BAD development for my wallet. 

I chose my first kindle book to be The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness. I'm not entirely sure why, but I'd heard some good things about it, and I've been suffering a bit from a cold the past week or so, and wanted something which wasn't going to be too challenging. 

The story is about a boy called Todd, who lives on a planet where men have been infected with some kind of disease where everyone can hear their thoughts (these thoughts are referred to as noise), and what happens when one day he finds a patch of quiet in all of the noise. 

That's as much as I'm going to say as that's all that I knew when I started reading :) 


I'm generally drawn to anything slightly dark, and this definitely is! There were several points in the book which made me go ewwww, as well, which I always enjoy. (Does that make me weird?)

One of the things that I thought might bother me is that Todd is the narrator of the story, and as where he lives education isn't exactly a priority, there are several words which are misspelt the whole way through. I can find this kind of thing really annoying in books, but I think that in this case it actually adds to his character. 

Although, as it is a YA book (I guess?), it did that slightly annoying Harry Pottery thing where swear words are inferred rather than explicitly written ("Ron said a word that he would never have said in front of his mother" kind of thing. Yeah, not a direct quote before anybody points that out, hehe). To be honest, I find it a bit weird that the amount of violence in this book seemed to be okay but a few bad words weren't.. I think any child who could handle the violence would also be able to deal with a bit of swearing! 

Overall though I really liked it, and I've already got the next book in the trilogy lined up and ready to go! Yay!