Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Knowing

Top positive review

Knowing is Amazing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2017

There's a lot that goes on beneath the surface (interestingly enough, given the setting of the book) of what's happening in the book. On the face of it, Samara escapes to Old Canaan to find a cure for the Knowing, and Beckett goes there too to [long spoiler alert] find out what happened to the colonists his predecessors sent to this planet, then the three accidentally meet, and are in fact, forced to hide from New Canaan's Council for fear of capture. Then, they embark on a journey back/to New Canaan, each for very different reasons and feelings, thoughts, loyalties, and plans changing a lot along the way. By the time they make it to the Outside settlement on the surface, before they descend Underneath, Samara to hide until she can get into the Archives to maybe find a cure for the Knowing and then give herself up for execution, and possibly Beckett and Jillian too in place of her imprisoned parents, Beckett to discover as much as he can about this people (to heck with the protocol), and Jillian because she's being dragged along, Samara has decided she can't give Beckett in but doesn't know what to do with him, Beckett keeps following (almost blindly) [end long spoiler alert].

It's that undercurrent that carries the first two-thirds of the book: the evolution of both Samara's and Beckett's knowledge about what happened to the people of Old Canaan (i.e. the people of The Forgetting), the actions they take once they learn that, and the feelings that each possesses about each other and the other key characters in the book. The rest is action that happens so fast that it's a little hard to keep up with, and all of that action is in reaction to the complicated discoveries made in the first two-thirds.

As far as stars, I'd give it 9.5 out of 10 just because I feel like there were one or two incidences where Cameron didn't reveal certain things (like the reason for the existence of the Outsider village by the Underneath) until too late in the story, which made it harder to keep up with things. If I were to make a nutrition facts label for this book, I would say that there was no sex, no swearing, a fair amount of violence, and some great descriptions of both valorous and ignoble deeds.

Who Would Like This Book?

Fans of any of Sharon Cameron's other books would obviously like this book, as would those of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking Series and of Amy Kaufman's and Meagan Spooner's These Broken Stars.

3 people found this helpful

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Talvi

... where it fit into the timeline and I felt like I had forgotten some key point in the ending ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 10, 2017

It took awhile for me to get into the Knowing - I had a hard time figuring out where it fit into the timeline and I felt like I had forgotten some key point in the ending to The Forgetting. Eventually, I learned this takes place 400 years in the future and so we won't have the culture or the protagonists from the first book. Instead we have a companion book that takes the theme of the first book and flips them around completely. It's a neat idea but it feels overwritten for that reason: this feels like a concept the author tried to develop into a story rather than a story that organically grew from a concept.

Story: Beckett and Jill are members of the Earth ship Centauri III. The mission of the ship: to find the lost colony of Canaan and make contact again to see how they fared. Samara Archiva is one of the knowing on Canaan - an eidetic people who never forget, never get sick, live hidden underground and rule the 'common people' who live outside and supply them. Both groups believe Earth is evil and hide so that they cannot be found - even though there has been no Earth contact for centuries. Samara recognizes there is something very wrong with her culture and escapes to the outside - only to run into the newly arrived and surveying Beckett and Jill. Both will require each other's help as they face death if caught by the Knowing.

With The Forgetting, Cameron explored memory and self - and how memories shape and create a person. With The Knowing, Cameron is exploring the consequences of being forced to never forget - either traumatic events such as the death of a loved one or the overload of information and having to 'cache' memories to be analyzed later. Of course, when you have people who cannot forget, the leaders soon realize you have to be very careful what you show people in order to control them.

As with the Forgetting, most of the people are unaware of the reasons why they are Knowing or the 12 year cycle that caused the Forgetting. So we have to go through all the discovers again, which felt a bit disingenuous. Both books relied on the protagonists being ignorant to a huge degree in order to create the tension and the drama. I couldn't help but feel that 'those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it' was a common thread through both books as well. But the plot of the book consists of Samara escaping, meeting Beckett, then returning underground. It felt underwhelming though there was some (admittedly feeling tacked on) action sequences.

There are two very large problems that really affected my enjoyment of the story. The first is that once again we have egregious insta-luv, including kissing someone you just met, on a foreign planet, when they are cold and unemotional to you. I just didn't believe it and really hated the whole 'insta-luv within minutes of meeting someone' scenario. Second, we have yet again where the adults are Evil (with a capital E) or Good (with a capital G) and only the teens sort of have nuances. We all know that the teens are going to save the world (or worlds, in this case) but that doesn't mean we have to have such a boring and huge divide between good and evil.

I also had a hard time getting into the characters. Beckett was the best written - his frustrations with Jill and Samara made sense. But Jill was made to be hated right from the beginning - so her character felt gratuitous and there only to create conflict with Samara. Similarly, all the adults and other characters were ciphers - cardboard thin characters there only to further the plot than to be creatively written assets to the story. If Samara had been more interesting, perhaps I would have enjoyed The Knowing more. But perhaps because the author wanted to make a point about knowledge replacing emotions, Sam felt more like a robot than a person.

The pathos in the book comes from the heartbreak of having to relive terrible moments perfectly in one's mind - or even having to relive the best moments in life that can never be repeated (e.g., a first kiss). Through most of the book, Samara perfectly recalls her history or things she's seen. This could perhaps have been done in a more clever way than that everything is archived in her mind and she only brings it out when she wants to see it - and so she doesn't put clues together until forced to archive certain memories that aren't in her consciousness. I couldn't help but feel with so much time on her hands every day, she would have been spending most of her time accessing various memories for entertainment as well as creating patterns and connections between those memories - her own version of TV or Google.

So while I did not enjoy The Knowing, it is also a solid read. Beckett was the redeeming character for me and I would have preferred to have stayed in his POV through the whole story (and without the Jill character). There are several twists at the end and we'll get a thin connection to the first book as well in the last pages. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

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Knowing is Amazing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2017

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3 people found this helpful

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Cricket

Good Sequel, But Not Great

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 4, 2021

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The Forgetting is one of my favorite books, and even after you've read it the first time and the know the secret(s), it's still an excellent re-read. So when I saw there was a sequel, I snapped it up right away.
Naturally, it's a different cast - it takes place long after the first book - but my problem was that I didn't find this cast of characters engaging. If anything, the occasional references to the first books - and glimpses of what happened after - were more fun than the new characters. The plot was guessable from the start, with no surprises in store.
Still, it reads well enough - it's just nowhere near as much fun.

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Katy Cannon

Incredible Duology

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 8, 2021

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This was such an amazing book. I loved this duology. I would highly recommend it for anyone who loves fantasy. It has a Giver vibe, but takes it so much further. I will cherish this series forever.

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LoLaJ

A fantastic companion.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 13, 2017

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I enjoyed this companion to THE FORGETTING so much! It was fascinating to get another look at this world from a new perspective (hundreds of years after Nadia and Gray's time). Being one of the Knowing like Samara would be a fascinating and also terrifying experience, I think. And Beckett's experiences discovering an entirely new planet are also well explored.

I didn't like the Jillian aspect to this story and the way it affected the romance, but I agree that once Beckett saw Samara that was it for each of them. I don't know if there will be more books in this world. But I'm happy to leave these characters to be. Sharon Cameron remains one of my favorite authors. I cannot wait to find out what she writes next.

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