"The Knife of Never Letting Go" book review

I am not that fond of the young-adult genre even though I am inside that age bracket. These books typically have good premise that will make you buy them for their good synopsis stated at the back of the book, but the execution and how the story unfolds are told in a really bad way. This has been the face of YA novels for me, until I read Patrick Ness's first book of the Chaos Walking series: The Knife of Never Letting Go. I found out about this book because I'm a fan of Charlie Kaufman's films (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), and I read in his IMDB page that he is writing a film that is based upon this book. So I read it, and since the book is "unputdownable," I finished it in a few sittings. This is a perfect example of what YA novels should be. The premise is good and most importantly original: it is about a boy named Todd living in a world where there is a disease that kills women and make the thoughts of men publicly available for people to hear. He's nearing his fourteenth birthday, which is the time you are considered to be a grown man, when he suddenly found something (I don't want to spoil it). The story is told pretty well and merits the good premise. It's suspenseful and exhilirating to read because the book circles around a cat-and-mouse chase, but also leaves the readers moments to breathe and to know more about the characters. The protagonists are not one dimensional for they did a balance of good and nasty stuff. I heard some criticism about this book that it's too brutal. I think Ness intentionally made the book graphic for the main theme of the novel is to show how nasty violence is. It doesn't fetishize the act of killing, rather it shows how violence scars people's minds, especially the young ones. If you have read this book, you should know well what I'm talking about, because this book plays on the ethical dilemma of killing a person.

I will read the second book of this series once I got a copy already. I hope I get it soon, for the first book ended in a massive cliffhanger.