Scythe by Neal Shusterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Scythe is an incredible book. Everything about it is top notch. I wish I could give it a million stars…
I’m close to the last person to read this Shusterman golden child, yet I am still going to rave about it nevertheless!
Set in a futuristic version of our world, where natural death no longer exists, Scythe, follows two young people, Citra and Rowan, who are chosen to apprentice with the powerful and well-respected, Scythe Faraday.
Scythes are granted the power to end life. The Scythedom is a world-wide community of individuals who have trained, passed trials and taken an oath to serve as Scythes, an ultramodern version of grim reapers.
As the Reader, we go along with Citra and Rowan as they meet Scythe Faraday and become his apprentices. We learn about the Scythedom as they do, which made the world come together naturally, versus an enormous info dump.
I always enjoy when an author can frame their world creation in this way. I know it doesn’t work with every story, but I love to learn things right along with our protagonists.
The further they get into it, the clearer it becomes that there is currently a schism building within the Scythedom. There are followers of the more traditional ways of the Order, and others who would like the shake up the status quo.
The system does indeed begin to shake, quite violently, and both Citra and Rowan find themselves right at the heart of it. The stakes are extremely high, as each teen struggles to make it through unscathed.
I loved the overall concepts presented in this book, as well as the characters and actions. It’s so well plotted and absolutely hooked me from the start.
Citra and Rowan were fun to get to know. They develop a bit of an unlikely friendship over the course of their apprenticeship and I really started to look at them like opposite sides of the same coin.
There are a lot of twists and turns throughout, some that I didn’t see coming from a mile away. Maybe I’m dense, but I’d like to think that it was because I was so in the moment with this story, that I wasn’t thinking further ahead.
I love too how philosophical Shusterman can get with his writing. I finished his Skinjacker trilogy not long ago, and encountered the same types of themes and issues explored there as here. It’s really first-rate stuff that makes you think and leaves you with a lot to consider.
At the conclusion of this installment, we had some fairly major revelations that left me chomping at the bit to get to the next book.
Luckily, I already have the entire series waiting for me on my shelves, so shall be getting to Thunderhead this month. I’m so excited to get back into it!!