The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness
The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness
The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness is the second book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, where all men can hear each other’s thoughts. There are no secrets anywhere! The novel picks up right where The Knife of Never Letting Go ends. Todd and Viola have finally made their long journey to Haven where Mayor Prentiss and his army have taken over the town and renamed it New Prentisstown.
Patrick Ness has created and described the characters very well in this book and you are forced to have feelings for both the enemies and heroes. I feel this is unusual because normally you can easily take sides for either the good or bad however, Patrick Ness has created this feeling that everyone is good in a certain way. Todd and Viola show friendship and love for each other throughout the novel, they have a place in each other’s hearts as they struggle through problems and conflicts everyday together. As they face their worst enemy Mayor Prentiss, the battle begins. A group of women led by Mistress Coyle are unhappy with the new changes in New Prentisstown and decide to leave and become the ‘ask’. They set out a series of bombings in the town just in time for the spackle war, while Todd has to work with Davy (Mayor Prentiss’s son)
The target audience for The Ask and the Answer I’d say is teenagers and the author’s style of writing is suitable for this audience as he has decided to use more advanced language to make us want to read on.
There are lots of themes in the novel some of which include action, adventure, conflict and good versus evil. All these make the book what it is - packed with adventure and excitement. The story is written with an interesting technique called ‘parallel storyline’ this is when each chapter is written about another character’s point of view. For example one chapter is Todd and the next is Viola and so on. This I found interesting as it gives you a wide range of description about what each character is doing and a better storyline. You don’t have time to be bored.
I have really enjoyed reading this book which was not only filled with hope of survival and winning the war there were also some sad parts to she storyline such as when the spackle were slaughtered by the answer. However I highly recommend this book to other teenagers as the end of each chapter and the end of the book are cliff-hangers which make you read on and on and also make you unable to put the book down, I’d give The Ask and the Answer a star rating of 5/5 as the Chaos Walking trilogy books are the best books I’ve read yet!
Lee
