The Knife of Never Letting Go

second read april 2021
ngl wasn't as fun the second time bc i already knew what happened - wish i could read this first the first time again! still loved the story tho & still 5 stars from me!

first read nov 2018
The first time I came across The Knife of Never Letting Go was on my younger sister's bookshelf. She has a collection of less than ten novels on her book and I wanted to read anything and everything at the beginning of my never-ending book binge. I saw this book had amazing reviews on Goodreads and those that I followed gave it a minimum of 4 stars. I read the synopsis and sigh it was a dystopian book.

See, I'm a realistic fiction kind of gal and I love a good romance and mystery book, but I hadn't really considered reading dystopia. During the Hunger Games craze of the early 2010's it seemed like everyone and their mother was writing a “super cool unique” dystopian book. I've read two that I remember in that time, those being Divergent by Veronica Roth and Delirium by Lauren Oliver, the first I thought was okay and the second I thought was kind of... bad. So, I was kind of turned off by the genere. Because The Knife of Never Letting Go had such good reviews and my little sister constantly telling me how AMAZING it was, I decided to finally start reading it.The first 40-50 pages were really hard for me to read. The reason I stick to realistic fiction is that I know the exact type of world they're in, but every dystopian society is different. I found all the introduction prose at the beginning boring and I almost stopped reading - until I got to page 55 and I COULDN'T stop. I loved the diction, I loved how unpredictable and tense the plot was, I loved Ness's word choice in the narration and how we had a faultless unreliable narrator. I also hated how much I loved the satisfyingly unsatisfying ending. I can't wait to read the next book in the series!!!!I also cried a lot while reading lmao: -Todd being forced to leave Cillian and Ben and him having no idea why-Todd hearing in Prentiss Jr's lying Noise about how he shot Cillian and Ben “twixt the eyes”-Todd and Viola floating down the river in boat while Aaron crushed Manchee to death-Todd and Viola finding Ben before finding Haven and Ben sacrifices himself to Prentiss Jr. so Todd and VIola can escapeJust such a good read :””””””(