“Ow? Todd? Ow?” THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, by Patrick Ness

Patrick Ness planned well. The first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy has a name that you can remember. (The title of the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, similarly balances mystery and familiarity.) In Knife, Ness introduces not only a protagonist but an entire world with a conundrum. In fact, this book is full of conundrums. Even the bad guys have them, as Ness patiently reveals. 

After hooking readers with the title, Ness shoves them into a world that’s immediately as familiar and strange as that title. The narrative is so homey and immediate, written in the first-person perspective of a boy who’s almost thirteen, that much of what’s strange fades until the strangeness builds up and bursts out.

The central premise, obvious in the first page of the book, is that the protagonist, Todd Hewitt, and his dog, Manchee, have a telepathic connection. In fact, Todd can hear the thoughts, referred to as “Noise” throughout the book, of other people and animals, and they can hear his. This was the result, we soon learn, of a germ that made something else happen, something that leaves Todd’s society looking very different from our own.

The first big concept is deceptively simple: on an alien world, people have telepathic connections with each other and animals. The soon-revealed other results of what caused those connections are not simple, but flow smoothly and naturally from the cause. The most remarkable part of Ness’ artistry, I think, is weaving these great concepts into a narrative that jolts the reader with surprising tension, and not a little violence, interspersed with very real human considerations (fairness and justice come up a lot without preachiness on the author’s part).

Ness mercilessly tests his protagnist, Todd Hewitt, with physical and emotional distress. Todd is joined in the book by a few strong and deep supporting characters, and an abundance of antagonists. All of the significant characters speak and act as genuine individuals. For example, Todd’s dog, Manchee, “speaks” (telepathically) and behaves in a way that suits what I know of dog behavior very well. The very beginning of the book reads,

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. About anything.

“Need a poo, Todd.”

“Shut up, Manchee.”

Ness indulges in a little potty humor to get the point across, but when Todd gets fed up with Manchee and swats him, Manchee’s reaction (“Ow? Todd? Ow?”) neatly captures the strange and familiar all at once.

There’s plenty more “Ow” to come. The supporting characters are defined by loss, and Ness masterfully parcels out the pace at which these losses is revealed. One character in particular comes to life as fully as Todd, and the workings of narrative perspective mesh tightly with the world and the characters’ relationship. I’m treading carefully to avoid spoiling this, because it’s a clever and significant aspect of the book.

Antagonists, too, get their due – although not necessarily in any moral sense. There’s no hiding who Todd’s enemies are. They come across as enemies at the start, and not only because Todd can hear their thoughts. However, they have complex motivations, some of them almost superhuman abilities, and Ness reveals them as slowly and tantalizingly as he does the protagonist and his allies.

One of the further joys of reading The Knife of Never Letting Go is the language. Todd’s first-person narrative is laced with misspellings. This marks his speech as accented, and him as barely literate. However, the publisher (Candlewick) has indulged Ness with a special, loose font (and later, an explosion of fonts) to indicate the feeling of Noise Todd hears from other characters. It’s integrated into the paperback cover design as well, and generally used to good effect. 

The Knife of Never Letting Go is violent, morally rich, and a compelling read. I started to read it out loud to my kids (then 11 and seven years old), and soon realized it was inappropriate. The conflicts in the Harry Potter books are, initially, much tamer and more cartoonish, though they mature as Harry ages, and the fear is more sustained than in the rip-roaring plots Rick Riordan drags Percy Jackson through. Ness is relentless, and for this I agree with the publisher’s age minimum recommended age of 14 on the back cover. I’m way over the maximum of 18, but I think it’s safer to ignore that than the minimum.

Amy Kathleen Ryan, Glow (Sky Chasers, vol. 1)

Glow is one of the reasons I love my job, and it has very little to do with it.

I get promotional emails from Publisher's Weekly, in order to keep current with teen literature, in a niche of which I publish. My niche is small and isolated, and I need PW to help me take a look around at what the age-mates of our intended readers - struggling, teenage readers who need exciting, accessible literature to help them become successful, habitual readers - are devouring. I want to know that makes them excited to read more, and what they wish they could read because of peer pressure and inherent interest.

One of the recent ones offered an advance reading copy of Glow, the third novel my Amy Kathleen Ryan. I read the first chapter or two, free online, with great interest. It coincided so closely with the setting and tone of first-time novelist Beth Revis' Across the Universe, which I read, and reviewed here, earlier this year.

Whereas ATU gripped my viscera at the beginning and subsided a bit into a simmering intergenerational confrontation and murder investigation aboard an interstellar space ship carrying humans from a battered Earth to a new home for their descendants, Glow built up from the hopes of appealing main characters into a thrilling intertribal confrontation and coming-of-age story aboard two interstellar space ships carrying humans....oh, you get the idea.

First, I am fascinated at the never-rains-but-it-pours aspect of this. I wasn't aware of any novels with such scenarios in the past decade, when I got swept up into Potter-mania, a bit late in life and in the timeline of Potter-mania. Now, with apparent suddenness, there are two.

Second, I loved the building tension of Glow. Similar to Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games, Glow starts by introducing deeply likeable teen characters, one male and one female, in an exotic setting that feels natural and whole, and then tears them apart. But whereas Hunger Games maintains Katniss Everdeen at the center of the narrative, Glow like ATU shifts the narrative  between the two main characters. In ATU, the main characters are less positively appealing. We feel sorry for them in many ways, but we never saw them at their best. We never had the chance to get to like them, to look forward to meeting them again.

In Glow, protagonists Waverly and Kieran seem like people I would have liked when I was their age. Their reactions to events evoke sympathy, emotional investment, because they are founded on a previous identification, a founding emotional investment. Even the dangerous and damaged  supporting characters look like people I got caught up with, cared about, and suffered with or because of when I was that age.

This means that when the climactic conflict occurs, so much of the reader's emotional investment is riding on it that it feels real. I felt my pulse quicken (just as advertised on the ARC back cover with the trite but applicable phrase "pulse-pounding"), even though the actual physical aspects of the confrontation were smaller than the conflicts at the opening of the second act of the novel.

After reading and enjoying Across the Universe, I was thrilled to read something in the same genre and in a very closely related setting, but when the book ended, I was caught off-guard. My wife figured this out first. "It must be part of a series," she said. (She's right, it's called Sky Chasers: http://us.macmillan.com/author/amykathleenryan.) However, it felt unfinished to me.

The Potter novels all (but one) end with the denouement of Harry returning to Privet Drive. The first two Hunger Games novels end with the tension ratcheting up in a new area. Glow ends differently, as if fifty pages had been left off the end. The conflict at the beginning isn't resolved. The new conflict is intriguing, and will probably draw me to reading the sequel. But I'm confused about the title's significance, the series name's significance, and the abruptness of the first novel's ending.

I was thinking of re-reading Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series...

...when the great and terrible Web intervened.

I followed a link about plot development - I couldn't resist the tone of ridicule - and found Nick Lowe's mocking 1982 "educational" essay, The Well-Tempered Plot Device.

Lowe takes down Donaldson, Susan Cooper, and JRR Tolkien (and several I don't know) for obvious plot devices, and proposes, tongue-in-cheek, a more appropriate manual for science fiction and fantasy than the usual how-to-write-a-good-novel. He proposes a how-to for cheap plot devices to get books into print and keep the sequels coming.

This all makes me feel better about struggling to write. I thought perhaps I was a hack. I thought I was taking clichéd approaches. I thought I was wasting my time. On reading Lowe's hilarious piece, I think now that I have been avoiding the simplistic plot devices he accused, almost two decades ago, of cheapening the genre I'm trying to contribute to.

I think I feel a little bit better.