All posts tagged: Scythe

The Future of Life and Death

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I fully intended not to like this book. YA fantasy is a little out of my wheelhouse, however, it hooked me more than I expected. The whole concept of the book — a future that has eradicated death and therefore tasks certain humans with the job of killing people in the name of population control — was fascinating to me. The first third of the book flew by as Schusterman built this world and introduced us to the main characters. And as much as I was entertained, it was too easy to put down. For some reason that I still can’t put my finger on I wasn’t eager to gobble it up. It did a good job of grappling with difficult questions in way that was accessible, and while it didn’t necessarily answer the questions, they’ve stuck with me. The characters were well developed and relatable, and I liked that the book’s focus wasn’t on a romance (something that happens a little too often in YA, IMO). While the book hinted that Citra and Rowan …

Scythe’s Unanswered Questions

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After reading a series of intense fiction and nonfiction books, I was really looking forward to something I could escape into. I’m a fan of the dystopian series I’ve read in the past (The Hunger Games, Divergent, An Ember in the Ashes, etc), and I’m always looking forward to finding another great series. I had moderately high hopes that Scythe might be my next favorite series. I was moderately disappointed. The premise, in my mind, was stellar. A future dystopia masked so well as a utopia that even as the reader I was convinced for most of the 430+ pages that this world could be what it seemed (if it weren’t for the fact that it’s a YA series so of course I know better); a world without natural death, disease or crime. It’s a world where climate change has been reversed and people can “turn a corner” at anytime to reverse their aging and return to youth. In this world all things are supervised by an evolution of the “cloud” known as Thunderhead whose moral …

May & June Book

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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 …