Yesterday you were gods. Today you are mortal. Your death is my gift to you.
Scythe
by Neal Shusterman
Genre: YA Fantasy
About: Death has been eliminated. There are no murders, there are no diseases. Fatal accidents, at best, will keep you out of commission for a couple of days, but nothing can truly bring about death. Nothing except a scythe. Scythes keep civilisation going, they kill without bias to cull an ever growing population that is now virtually immortal. But Rowan and Citra, as scythe apprentices, will come to discover that in this perfect world, scythes are far from being incorruptible.
The Good
The concept is pretty interesting. What would a world without death look like? I like the idea of people having to take up the mantle of this grim reaper figure to keep the population in check and I think the descriptions about their traditions and the emotional toll a job like that can have on a person was well done.
The Bad
This story dragged so much when it should have been a fast read. The competition element between Rowan and Citra was a good hook and there's plenty of spectacle in seeing people being 'gleaned', yet somehow the pace was slow. The book was a true reflection of the world Shusterman was trying to make: everything was stagnant, especially the characters. This is marketed as a Young Adult novel but it felt very Middle Grade to me as the characters were completely black and white. I hated how obvious everything felt. The twists were not really twists and getting both Rowan's and Citra's POV meant that there was no tension between them. We were never unsure how either of them felt or what their motivations were and there was no pay off in the climax either. Worst was probably the romance which lacked so much passion and, again, is why I think this is absolutely Middle Grade, not Young Adult.
The Somewhat Iffy
While the concept was good and some aspects of the Scythedom was well done, the overall world-building was bad. Hard to read at times as it drew me out of the story when something so obviously didn't make any sense. The ethos of the Scythedom is to compassionately 'glean' the lives of others, yet they train to kill in horrific ways. Blades, guns, flame-throwers. The flame-thrower is at least addressed at some point, but one of the most compassionate scythes has a man drown? Why wouldn't they have one humane method for gleaning? Like a syringe or a pill? Learning martial arts and wielding samurai swords doesn't fit the profile of what the organisation is supposed to be about. And for that matter, why is killing children a thing in this immortal age? We get rid of death but as a society allow a child who hasn't lived a full life yet to be eligible for gleaning?
Also the references were confusing. This is supposed to be centuries in the future and the 'Mortal Age' is so far behind them that they no longer know the word for murder or terrorist or torture. These things are so far behind them that they've been erased from common knowledge. And yet they say things like 'When in Rome...' and reference so many other things that show clearly that our history is still known to them. It just made me roll my eyes when they'd come across a word they didn't understand. Especially when Scythe Goddard is literally mass murdering people and their tools are tools of torture.
And I hated the descriptions of Rowan or Citra fighting. They are apprentices for maybe a year during the course of the book and yet the way their fighting skills are talked about is as though they have been training their whole lives. Both of them can defeat people with many years of training and experience. If martial arts and knowledge in all the ways of 'killcraft' is necessary to the job (and I don't think it should be) then the apprenticeships should be starting way earlier than sixteen.
Overall
This should have been marketed as Middle Grade as the world-building and character development felt aimed at a far younger audience than YA. Hard to suspend the disbelief most of the time. A cool concept but I didn't enjoy the execution personally.
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