The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking. It’s what’s true and what’s believed and what’s imagined and what’s fantasized and it says one thing and a completely opposite thing at the same time and even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what’s true and what’s not when yer getting everything? Men’s minds are messy places and Noise is like the active, breathing face of that mess. It’s crash and clatter and it usually adds up to one big mash of sound and thought and picture and half the time it’s impossible to make any sense of it at all. Rumor has it that there was a virus that spread in this new world, causing men to hear each others’ thoughts, and the women to die. For Todd who was born into this world, there was never a moment of silence. In this futuristic universe, everyone can hear (and even envision) everyone’s thoughts in a torrent of Noise – even ‘creachers’ or animals have a voice. They have moved past the ‘realm of the imagined’ – to embodied, actual beings with their own thoughts and realities. Prentisstown, Todd Hewitt (the last boy in this ‘cursed’ town), Viola Eade – live on through him, and independent of him, the writer. Ness, however, has managed to carve a niche for himself in this story alongside masterful storytellers of not only the YA genre, but in the literary world. While it may bring to mind a few popular dystopian novels such as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (another trilogy I loved and enjoyed), I was reminded more of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with the rebuilding-the-world sense – and a few threaded themes that may be considered tangentially similar. The setting of the novel is somewhere in the not-so-distant future, enough to warrant it a dystopian vibe. While not overtly apparent, I felt quite simply that the subtleties embedded in the story and the ultimate message conveyed are empowering and highlight that sense of other-ness and sense of unity/communion that permeates humanity and the universal tenets of compassion, courage, and wholeness.Ī River of Noise and the Stones of Silence: The Male-Female Conundrum. Todd Hewitt, the voice in the tale, also prefigures greatly in the narrative and in this write up.

It is true that a large part of the book is wrapped around the concept of becoming a man . While I have repeatedly shared that I dread writing reviews of YA books (especially those I feel very strongly about), I am willing to make certain exceptions. For this particular ‘review’ – I am stretching my creative boundaries a little by weaving my musings around the female protagonist: Viola Eade. Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC).Literary Voyage Around The World Reading Challenge 2018.#WomenReadWomen2019 (A Year Of Women Reading Women) Reading Progress.

#ReadIntl2020 (Year Of International Literature) Reading Progress.#DecolonizeBookshelves2022 Reading Progress.#DecolonizeReading2023 Reading Progress.

The knife of never letting go book 2