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serynI'm about halfway through The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. I read the prequel short story recently (it was a free Kindle book) and I liked the writing enough to see if the library had any other of his books in the series.
I am finding it alterately speeding along and a hard slog. It's hard to recommend it because of that.
I do really like the typesetting in the book. There was a lot of effort to convey the effect of Noise... (like an unfiltered telepathy) by using various fonts and arrangement effects. If it were done in straight-up text, the experience would have been seriously degraded.
But the main character is under-educated and wavers between choosing the adult path and being extremely childish. It's hard to not hate him just for constantly monologuing in Hagrid-speak.
What's redeeming this as a book is that it's actually a real science fiction type story. It's marketed to the YA market, but it's not fantasy-romance or fantasy-horror or sf-war or whatever cross-genre publishers are pushing because they're afraid calling something science fiction will crush its chances. And to a certain extent that actually uplifts this book from the morass that adult fantasy has trended toward. There are some serious concepts in this that if the book had been written with adult protagonists would have been completely appropriate for a non-age targeted market.
I am finding it alterately speeding along and a hard slog. It's hard to recommend it because of that.
I do really like the typesetting in the book. There was a lot of effort to convey the effect of Noise... (like an unfiltered telepathy) by using various fonts and arrangement effects. If it were done in straight-up text, the experience would have been seriously degraded.
But the main character is under-educated and wavers between choosing the adult path and being extremely childish. It's hard to not hate him just for constantly monologuing in Hagrid-speak.
What's redeeming this as a book is that it's actually a real science fiction type story. It's marketed to the YA market, but it's not fantasy-romance or fantasy-horror or sf-war or whatever cross-genre publishers are pushing because they're afraid calling something science fiction will crush its chances. And to a certain extent that actually uplifts this book from the morass that adult fantasy has trended toward. There are some serious concepts in this that if the book had been written with adult protagonists would have been completely appropriate for a non-age targeted market.
