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Sun Sep 27th, 2015
 | 12:55 pm - A Downer is an Upper?
Finished The Knife of Never Letting Go at 2 am last night. Short term- yes, gotta find out what happens. Long term- why does anyone read dystopia? Why is there so *much* YA dystopia? (There was an article about that somewhere.) I suppose it's a corrective to the mandatory happi endo of kids' books. Today you are a man, so now you can read books where the hero and his entire family die, as well as the dogs and horses. (Actually, isn't that Njal's Saga? But why would you read Njal's Saga either.)
Certainly has echoes of Riddley Walker: premature (by our standards) adulthood, dialect, post-catastrophe world. Of course RW is a tour-de-force and much more opaque than Knife: I wasn't entirely sure what was happening / had happened much of the time, and needed the Coles' Notes to help me out. Knife lays things out for you, as you would expect, even if it takes forever to do so. Among the irritations was the 'every time someone's about to tell Todd the truth, they're interrupted by some new threat.' The other irritation (aside form what one reviewer called 'Aaron the Energizer Bunny' and I mean *really*. Is the man a cyborg? a zombie? a character in Angel Sanctuary?) is if the women are immune to this germ, why does it make them passively psychic? They can hear but not be heard. That's not immunity; it's a selective infection.
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