Oddly enough, more post-apocalyptic young adult fiction, and an interesting back-to-back read with the Collins.
As this one begins, Todd is just days away from his 13th birthday, on which he will, by Prentisstown tradition, become a man. He will be the youngest, and the last, man in Prentisstown, as all of the women were killed shortly after his birth.
Prentisstown has not had a happy history; it is, as Todd has been taught, the last surviving human colony on New World, and the handful of men who survived the war with the planet's alien inhabitants lead a difficult existence. That existence is made even harder by the Noise, one of the side effects of the alien bioweapons. The Noise makes the thoughts of all men in Prentisstown audible to one another; privacy is a thing of the past. (Even some of the larger animals can now speak, and generate Noise of their own.)
But the history of Prentisstown is not exactly as Todd has learned it, as he discovers when he finds a mysterious silent spot in the Noise outside town, and his foster fathers immediately pack him up and tell him to leave town, running as fast as he can. It is, of course, awfully hard to run away from people who can hear your every thought.
Ness isn't always successful at laying out the true history of New World and Prentisstown; it's hard to create a world plagued by the Noise and simultaneously allow the entire town to somehow have kept these secrets from Todd for all of these years. But the chase is an exciting one, and in the town's preacher, Aaron, Ness gives us a top-notch villain.
Like Collins' Hunger Games, this is Book One of a larger whole; unlike Collins, Ness ends his Book One mid-stream, with none of his major plotlines resolved in any significant way. I always find that annoying; I want there to be some sense of completion or resolution when I get to the end of a book.
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