Doglands out, Knife of Never Letting Go in (Coincidentally two books with dogs!)
I gave up on Doglands. I had to, it just kept going downhill. I love books about talking animals, but I want them to be animals who talk, not humans who happen to be in animal shape. The dogs in Doglands knew as much as any human would. How would a dog who was born in what was basically a puppymill to a dog who was born there to a dog who was born there (down the line), with no contact with the outside world, know about lions? About germs? That vets like to keep their work area sterile?
The author did do one thing I really liked. The dogs didn't understand English, but they could pick up tones and basic ideas, so when they listened to people talk they heard something like:
Bob looks to Mike, "Joke joke joke."
Mike says, "Laugh laugh laugh!"
Mary snorts. "Mock mock mock!"
Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, on the other hand, is AMAZING. I literally loved it from the first sentence. How is this for an opening line?
The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is dogs don't got nothing much to say.
Usually I hate typed-out accents, but this one works. And it's so much more than accents! It's told in first person by an uneducated boy, so there are lots of misspellings and such (it's actually fun to sound them out to figure out what he means to say!).
This book is so amazing, but the worst/best part is I can't tell you anything about the plot! This book does the thing I love most best of all: It drops you off into a whole new world, a world where nothing at all is familiar, and tells you nothing about it going in. I'm only 4% into the book and I've learned so much! And each little thing you learn is a wonderful discovery!
It kills me that this book has been sitting in my To Read pile for YEARS. It's so damned good! (Though one positive to that is the author had time to finish the trilogy, so no delay for the next books!)
Oh, and the audio book seems to rock, too. Check out the sample on the Amazon page I linked! Top left, directly under the cover image. (The clip comes from just a couple pages in, so some things won't make sense when you listen, but they don't make sense to readers either at that point.)
The author did do one thing I really liked. The dogs didn't understand English, but they could pick up tones and basic ideas, so when they listened to people talk they heard something like:
Bob looks to Mike, "Joke joke joke."
Mike says, "Laugh laugh laugh!"
Mary snorts. "Mock mock mock!"
Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, on the other hand, is AMAZING. I literally loved it from the first sentence. How is this for an opening line?
The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is dogs don't got nothing much to say.
Usually I hate typed-out accents, but this one works. And it's so much more than accents! It's told in first person by an uneducated boy, so there are lots of misspellings and such (it's actually fun to sound them out to figure out what he means to say!).
This book is so amazing, but the worst/best part is I can't tell you anything about the plot! This book does the thing I love most best of all: It drops you off into a whole new world, a world where nothing at all is familiar, and tells you nothing about it going in. I'm only 4% into the book and I've learned so much! And each little thing you learn is a wonderful discovery!
It kills me that this book has been sitting in my To Read pile for YEARS. It's so damned good! (Though one positive to that is the author had time to finish the trilogy, so no delay for the next books!)
Oh, and the audio book seems to rock, too. Check out the sample on the Amazon page I linked! Top left, directly under the cover image. (The clip comes from just a couple pages in, so some things won't make sense when you listen, but they don't make sense to readers either at that point.)