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oashackelford's Reviews (351)
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.
Ivy, Cal and Mateo just want to recreate the best skip day that they have ever had, but it all goes terribly wrong when they run into their classmate dead on the floor of an art studio. Now they need to figure out how to keep themselves from looking guilty and stay out of trouble until they have a chance to figure out who actually did it.
I will be honest I don't think the stakes were high enough for each kid not to go to the cops. In Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series I completely understood why the girls weren't running to the cops because their secrets would have ruined their lives. These kids only had mildly embarrassing reasons or circumstantial evidence for why they would have been involved and the whole thing didn't seem desperate enough for them not to be going to the cops.
I will say though that I thought the author did a good job at leaving little clues so that you could try and figure out who the killer is, and I did enjoy the twist at the end of the book. I am actually looking forward to the sequel, hopefully the stakes are a little bit higher this time.
I will be honest I don't think the stakes were high enough for each kid not to go to the cops. In Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series I completely understood why the girls weren't running to the cops because their secrets would have ruined their lives. These kids only had mildly embarrassing reasons or circumstantial evidence for why they would have been involved and the whole thing didn't seem desperate enough for them not to be going to the cops.
I will say though that I thought the author did a good job at leaving little clues so that you could try and figure out who the killer is, and I did enjoy the twist at the end of the book. I am actually looking forward to the sequel, hopefully the stakes are a little bit higher this time.
