"Knife of Never Letting Go"

From Patrick Ness (the author): "At their heart, I believe that the Chaos Walking books are about finding out who you are: finding out what you believe in, what you’re capable of, what mistakes you’ll make, and what you’ll do after those mistakes. Which is, of course, what every day of being a teenager is like.
 
The story originally started out when I was feeling particularly sensitive one day to the constant torrent of information we face today: e-mail, texts, Facebook, Twitter. You can’t turn around without someone coming after you, demanding to tell you what they think. And how much worse is it if you’re young?
 
If you think about it, teenagers these days have less privacy than anyone has ever had in the history of the Western world. So much of modern-day teenage life is lived online, to a degree inconceivable even ten years ago. I began wondering what it would be like if you really couldn’t escape, if you really had no privacy at all, right at the time when you needed privacy the most. And that spawned both the Noise and the character of Todd, suffering under the weight of all this public knowledge. Then one day, he meets Viola, who is as silent as the “black beyond” she came from, and he learns that real communication, real connection, is still possible."

"Monsters of Men"

From Patrick Ness (the author): "The story of Todd and Viola and how their relationship develops mirrors what I think is the most important part of being a teenager: learning to reach out, learning what other people are like, learning to trust them, maybe even learning to love them and let them love you.
 
Because that’s where I think the hope in the books lies, even in Monsters of Men, in which Todd and Viola are in the middle of a seemingly unstoppable war. They have each other, they have what they’ve learned form each other, and if anything’s going to get them through the messiness and horror of war, it’s what they’ve learned together."

The Flint Heart

The Sniffles for Bear