Hey guys! Over my October holidays I finally picked up the 3rd book in the Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness, 'Monsters of Men.' I've already reviewed the books prequels, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and The Answer so I'll link them here and here.
Monsters of Men picks up immediately after The Ask and the Answer ends, with impending war between the Spackle army, the Answer's band of female terrorists and Mayor Prentiss's army. Todd is with Prentiss's army and Viola has been with the Answer, and is running off to greet the new arrivals from her home planet (yes I know that if you hadn't read this series before then it sounds mad but I promise it's brilliant!)
The book then follows Viola and Todd as they attempt to restore peace in New Prentisstown between the Spackles and the humans, prepare for the arrival of 5000 other new people from the other planet that Viola came from, as well as dealing with their rather messed up 'relationship' and various illnesses.
This book is incredibly fast paced, so it's 600 pages make for extremely quick reading. You really see the truly devastating effects of war on these two young people as well as the city as a whole. There's also an underlying theme about how the humans not only treat each other, but how they treat the Spackles. Plus a whole load of human nature arguements. I know that a class in my year at school are studying the first book in this series for their course in English this year, so hopefully that demonstrates the amount of study material that Ness has incorporated into the series.
Now, I really didn't think I was going to like the ending, my only previous complaints about these books was that Ness has a tendency to leave books on cliff hangers and I was terrified this would be the same. However, whilst the ending wasn't completely conclusive, and you could argue it wasn't resolved so there was a cliffhanger, it was vastly better than I'd expected so top marks for that too! The Chaos Walking trilogy is definitely up there with the best books I've ever read!
Plot: 10/10
Characters: 8/10
Overall: 9/10
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