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A review by oashackelford
Scythe by Neal Shusterman
5.0
In a world where mortality is a thing of the past, how do you keep down population growth?
Set sometime in the distant future Citra and Rowan are two kids living in the time of post-mortality. Science and medicine have gotten so good that when a person gets too old they can "turn the corner" and age their genetics down to their twenties again. An uncorrupted AI is the government now and people have nanites in their blood that prevent them from getting too depressed or from fully dying if they suffer an unfortunate accident. So in a world where no one dies on purpose, and no one stays dead then how do you control population growth? The Scythes.
The Scythes are men and women chosen to carry out people's deaths. Each of them have a quota to prevent the population from growing to large and their job is to mercifully, and without bias, kill about five people a week. Some scythes think the limits are good, others are growing tired of them.
This book was so interesting because it is marked as teen but I think it raises universal questions. Questions like, what is the meaning of humanity? What happens to humanity when we take away the highs and lows that bring us both joy and pain? If death is no longer natural and there is no more learning to be done, then what is the point of us?
I think this is my favorite book that I have read all year. I got the same feeling that I did from reading the Hunger Games for the first time. Or from reading a really good John Green book. It raises so many questions and I know I am going to be thinking about the book for a long time after I read it.
Set sometime in the distant future Citra and Rowan are two kids living in the time of post-mortality. Science and medicine have gotten so good that when a person gets too old they can "turn the corner" and age their genetics down to their twenties again. An uncorrupted AI is the government now and people have nanites in their blood that prevent them from getting too depressed or from fully dying if they suffer an unfortunate accident. So in a world where no one dies on purpose, and no one stays dead then how do you control population growth? The Scythes.
The Scythes are men and women chosen to carry out people's deaths. Each of them have a quota to prevent the population from growing to large and their job is to mercifully, and without bias, kill about five people a week. Some scythes think the limits are good, others are growing tired of them.
This book was so interesting because it is marked as teen but I think it raises universal questions. Questions like, what is the meaning of humanity? What happens to humanity when we take away the highs and lows that bring us both joy and pain? If death is no longer natural and there is no more learning to be done, then what is the point of us?
I think this is my favorite book that I have read all year. I got the same feeling that I did from reading the Hunger Games for the first time. Or from reading a really good John Green book. It raises so many questions and I know I am going to be thinking about the book for a long time after I read it.