The Ask And The Answer

My review of The Ask And The Answer by Patrick Ness is up now at Strange Horizons.

As you probably know by now, I am a huge fan of The Knife Of Never Letting Go and I’ve even managed to persuade a couple of people to go out and buy it. So it was a pleasure to find that The Ask And The Answer lived up to the promise of the first volume:

I said Ness had been radical and he has. The Knife Of Never Letting Go is essentially an adventure story; a superior and serious minded example but an adventure nonetheless. The Ask And The Answer may be slower and less exhilarating to begin with than its predecessor but that is because it requires a fundamental change of mindset from the reader. This is no adventure: it is a war story in which our erstwhile hero and heroine gradually become a concentration camp guard and a suicide bomber.

However, it is not without is flaws and in this I find myself pretty much in agreement with Dan.