isabella_schwr 's review for:

The Toll by Neal Shusterman

4.0

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This book was insane. I don’t even know where to begin. The pacing is a mess. The first 75% moves like molasses because every single storyline is stretched out and expanded in so much detail. Then suddenly everything happens all at once in the final stretch, cramming in every major resolution at once.

There are a million characters and storylines flying around. It switches POVs every couple of pages, jumps through random timelines with no warning, and introduces so many new subplots that it feels like there should be at least three more books just to handle it all.

Still, the world is fascinating, and the ideas are still really smart. I just wish the ending didn’t kind of undermine the entire series.

Spoiler

The big scythedom fail safe felt too clean and unrealistic, not mkaing sense with everything we learned about the world and why the scythedom was created. Still, I mostly liked where the characters ended up.