I loved this book. A perfect Ya/children's story about love and loss. It seemed to have a lot in common with the Iron Giant and Skellig, and all thoseI loved this book. A perfect Ya/children's story about love and loss. It seemed to have a lot in common with the Iron Giant and Skellig, and all those kinds of stories where a child meets a slightly dangerous magical figure who becomes a surrogate parent to them in troubled times. It is beautifully illustrated and Patrick Ness's sometimes fragmented writing style goes so well with the spiky black and white drawings. The last couple of chapters had me welling up with tears....more
The Knife of Never Letting Go is a YA novels set in a dystopian future on a Earth-like planet called New World, where people constantly hear each otheThe Knife of Never Letting Go is a YA novels set in a dystopian future on a Earth-like planet called New World, where people constantly hear each others thoughts. The narrator Todd Hewitt is a settler (his family came from Earth on a spaceship) and he lives in Prentiss Town a tiny outpost with his talking dog Manchee (all the animals on New Earth can talk). One day, while walking in the woods Todd discovers a patch of silence and so begins a journey that sends him running from his home and everything he once thought true.
The best thing about the book is Manchee the talking dog, who Ness use to create a brilliant opening line and first page hook. The second best thing is the way the characters read each others minds. The different fonts for people's thoughts and the way Todd would thinks something in his narration and the character he was talking to might comment on this in the next paragraph, worked really well. That said, this clever idea undermines the credibility of the reveals and makes them problematic, because if everyone knows everything about everyone, how can there be secrets?
I loved Todd's present tense narration and the mixed style of simple language and odd misspelled words. He's uneducated but he can think and reason like a modern teenager. He even occasionally address the reader directly, with little asides. The plot is a real adrenaline pumping page turner and the themes reminded me of both Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban and also of the Chrysalids by John Wyndham, two of my favourite dystopian fantasy books about young people. This book, though good, for me did not quite reach those heights, because after all the horror movie shocks, all the fight and flight, I wanted some kind of resolution, which I didn't really get from the ending, but maybe that's a problem with continuing serials....more
For me The Tin Princess was not as successful as the other books in the Sally Lockhart quartet, probably because it is neither about Sally Lockhart orFor me The Tin Princess was not as successful as the other books in the Sally Lockhart quartet, probably because it is neither about Sally Lockhart or Victorian London, both of which are the thing that interested me about this YA series in the first place.
Some spoilers...
Instead the plot is about Razkavia a made up Germanic state in middle Europe. Where members of the royal family are being bumped off. Our heroes Jim and Becky fall into this world of royal-intrigue, by way of Adelaide, the little cockney sparrow of the first book, who by the most improbable turn of events has become a member of the Royal Family of Razkavia.
It's a broad exciting adventure well written, just like the first three books, but unlike those stories I didn't think that the starting point of this one, or in fact much that happened along the way, was credible for the characters. Especially for Jim and Adelaide, both London cockney street-kids, who are suddenly versed in enough German and state-craft in the space of a few chapter to out-manouveur a bunch of professional politicians and generals and to care enough to try and save a country to which they have no real attachments. I also didn't feel that they had as much emotional investment in the outcome of their story as Sally had in her adventures. The third main character, Becky seemed to be there to paper over some of these credibility gaps by witnessing how in love the other two were and how brave and how cunning etc. etc. Having said all that, it's still an enjoyable adventure romp, with lots of daring-do and action.
**spoiler alert** The third book in the series of the Sally Lockhart Quartet is the longest and also by far the most interesting. Sally now has a two **spoiler alert** The third book in the series of the Sally Lockhart Quartet is the longest and also by far the most interesting. Sally now has a two year old daughter named Harriet, whose father was the late Frederick Garland. Her financial business is successful and she live in a house in Richmond with old friends, Jim and Webster Garland, who are away in South America on a photographic assignment. But Sally's idyllic and unconventional middle-class life is shattered when she receives legal papers from a Mr Parrish, a man she's never heard of, who claims to be her husband. He is requesting custody of Harriet and he aims to ruin Sally and take her daughter and all her assets for himself. All of Victorian male society is against Sally and she is gradually stripped of everything she holds dear. Without her old friends to help her, she must once more use her wits and bravery to defend herself against the mysterious Mr Parrish as she sets out to discover the purpose of his plot and to right the injustice that he has brought upon her.
It all sounds a bit melodramatic, but as usual the writing is brilliant, suspenseful and character driven. The plot is really a chance for Phillip Pullman to explore in detail the issues of Victorian London, from women's lack of marital rights to the suffering and lack of rights of the East End poor and the Toynbee-esque charities trying to help them. We meet dockers, London gangs, Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms and the socialist radicals among them – here represented by Dan Goldberg, the stories other hero. All of these social-historical issues are subtly woven into a dramatic and action packed edge-of-the seat story, and you never feel like Phillip Pullman is crowbarring in his research. Instead the characters who represent these issues become friends and allies of Sally in her fight against the evil Mr Parrish, his shadowy employer (whose identity is pretty obvious if you read the first two books in the series), and the patriarchal Victorian Law. As the story goes on Sally gets to witness and assist her friends in their own struggles, which, as it unsurprisingly turns out, are connected with her own.
Interestingly, there are little ideas and themes that link with His Dark Materials. The villainous Tzadick and his pet monkey that people claim is an evil spirit or a part of his soul, and that feeds him and defends him from those who would do him harm. The child kidnapping plot - albeit here seen from Sally, the Tiger-mother's, point of view. At one point, Sally and Dan Goldberg have a glass of Tokay, which is apparently a Hungarian Wine and is also a favourite tipple in His Dark Materials – I always wondered what it was.
The London detail has got more believable as the Sally Lockhart series has gone on, there was alway a quality of description but the social and historical detail seems to be much better and subtler in this book. Altogether my favourite in the series so far....more
The writing as usual with Phillip Pullman is elegant and engaging with superb pace that keeps the story bubbling along all the time. I thought it was The writing as usual with Phillip Pullman is elegant and engaging with superb pace that keeps the story bubbling along all the time. I thought it was actually marginally better than Ruby in the Smoke. It's still not quite five stars for me as it does have one of those James Bond endings where the villain explains his whole plot to the heroine (Sally) and then stands around while she thwarts it. I didn't mind the bitter sweet nature of the end either, but there were a few scenes where I felt people acted out of character to further the story. That said it kept me gripped to the very last page and the last third really ups the ante on the action. Looking forward to reading the next in the series...more
This is a YA classic. It's very short and I read it in a day. It's an epistolary novel set in 1991. 15 year old 'Charlie' writes letters about his lifThis is a YA classic. It's very short and I read it in a day. It's an epistolary novel set in 1991. 15 year old 'Charlie' writes letters about his life and posts them to a stranger (the reader) because he 'just needs to know that someone out there listens'. He's an odd and lonely kid - a wallflower - who spends his time observing the world rather than being part of it. That is, until he meets Sam and Patrick, two older, outsider-cool, kids at his school who are step-brother and step-sister and who make it their mission to bring Charlie out of his shell and introduce him to a wider world.
In Charlie, his sensitive and highly observant narrator, Stephen Chbosky perfectly captures the difficulties everyone feels as a teenager from awkwardly negotiating social situations, to working out who you are compared to others and what you really want for yourself. I could really relate to Charlie through all of his school travails and in many ways he reminded me of my teenage self - of that exact same era! Unlike some reviewers I did not think that Charlie was autistic or dysphasic. I just think there are a couple of bad authorial choices that maybe suggest this, and the fact that the reader is forced to fill in so many blanks to explain things does not help either.
SPOILERS...
As the novel goes on Chbosky piles more and more serious problems on Charlie. Charlie is in therapy. He's depressed, anxious, and highly emotional (he cries on every page). He has to deal with a friends suicided and with his family, who on the surface seem normal but underneath are in deep denial about the present and their history. Finally, Charlie has to face some issues from his own past that are effecting his life. All these things are big challenges that deserve more in-depth drama and resolution, but because Charlie is our highly unreliable narrator and because he doesn't want to deal with them in his cheery letters, we are forced to skim over them too. What's left is Charlie's day to day life which by the end of the novel has become banal in comparison to all the things under the surface. The problem is most evident in the short shrift given to the ending, a reveal that nearly made me throw the book across the room. All that aside, in terms of teenage voices, to me Charlie is the closest to real I have ever read....more
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