The story of Todd Hewitt, told in this novel, is the paradigm of the human being in relation to his environment. Only the current environment of our society is treated as a futuristic allegory in this story.
The taking of perspective that science fiction gives us as an excuse to raise any plot always provides a greater capacity for understanding the circumstances that surround us, or rather that they besiege us as individuals on many current occasions ...
And yet, to tell one of these science fiction stories you also have to energize the story, pose a dynamism, a narrative tension. That is where the know-how of patrick ness stands out greatly to offer us an attractive story as a result.
We set out from Prentisstown, a settlement in the New World, a kind of city for humans on a planet where life could finally be conceived for our species. Todd Hewitt lives in this unique city, a teenager about to move towards maturity full of demands and full of post-truths that for Todd sometimes sounds like incredible lies.
The worst of all is the noise… In Prentisstown thoughts are not free, they flow through the new air capable of exporting them from the mind to the common ideology.
Together with his dog Manchee, Todd discovers a remote lake where a patch of silence frees him from the deafening noise of thoughts and ideas. But his secret is revealed as soon as he returns to the city and his parents finally open up to him escaping from there, before the order of the city ends up pointing out him as some kind of dissident.
Todd escapes from Prentisstown with his dog and with a knife as a tool with which to face whatever dangers arise.
When Todd discovers the origin of the lake's patch of silence, which is none other than a girl who has been able to establish that redoubt of freedom, he may begin to assume a new truth, a new destiny, a life of discoveries ...
A new story that can be understood as a fantastic extrapolation of the previous Patrick Ness novel: Free.
You can now buy the novel The Knife in the Hand, the new book by Patrick Ness, with discounts for accesses from this blog, here: