Spring is here! It reminds us of when we used to look forward to the last day of school… yearbooks, textbook buyback, cleaning out your locker, and putting away the required reading for a good book you could actually choose yourself. And such is our May & June pick, a dystopian young adult novel that’s the first of a new series, and definitely a book we would have chosen as soon as school let out.

Scythe tells the story of two teenagers, Citra Terranova and Rowan Damisch, who undergo training as they are recruited into the Scythe organization to be society-sanctioned killers. The Scythes: a group of men and women who decide who lives, and who dies. Set in the very distant future, death by natural causes has been virtually eliminated due to the tremendous advances in technology and an advanced computer system that controls society. But overpopulation is still an issue, and that’s where the Scythe organization comes in to choose who to eliminate. With no hunger, no war, no disease, the world seems like a utopia. But Citra and Rowan discover things are not what they seem. Are they ever?

“These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.”  Goodreads

Author Neal Shusterman has been awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for teenage novels (2017)  for Scythe and reached New York Times bestseller status. And this is just the first in the series. In fact, the second in the series, Thunderhead, just came out in January. We’ve also heard that they’ll be turning the series into a movie (that’s always a good sign that’s a good YA read, right?). Anyway, we’re looking forward to reading this one and escaping for a little while. We hope you’ll read along with us! Don’t forget to share using #booklymark!

P.S. Technically we try not to read anything over 400 pages, but since this one runs over two months we’re making and exception to our rules 😉