"Scythe" by Neil Shusterman

I’d consider myself a casual fan of the dystopia genre, having read and enjoyed books like The Giver, The Hunger Games, and The Roar. When I came across the book at the book store its premise— as well as a nagging notion that I’d heard of the series before— immediately piqued my interest.

Despite the genre it does not really remind me of any of the aforementioned books or series. That is not to say it is some daring escape from the tropes of its genre, but that the narration and world evoked a very different feeling. A lot of banal comparisons can be made to the Giver: natural death has been (all but) eradicated, humanity has lost something vital in its pursuit of perfection, but these similarities are surface level as the ideas are taken in a wildly different direction.

It’s an interesting view into a world where meaning and purpose has slowly evaporated. The use and integration of technology into the world is just present enough to serve as a reminder that this is an existence distinctly separate from our own. I also appreciated that explanations of the worlds and systems were not forced into conversation. Expository narration is present where needed, but many things are just said or named, and it is left to the reader to infer the meaning. (Many of the ideas and technologies are easy enough to understand by name alone. Science Fiction is a well established genre, after all.)

There are a few issues with the story that held it back. As this is a YA novel, there is an obligatory romantic relationship between the two main characters. A platonic camaraderie would have been more compelling than the token romance that felt stapled on. One major plot event happens out of nowhere and I’m still unsure of how I feel about it. It’s very strange for something so major to happen and jarringly shift the story while also feeling like it accomplished nothing at all. The action makes sense in retrospect, but the fact that it has little impact undermines what probably should have been one of the more emotional moments in the book. The antagonist was rather underwhelming and because of this the moment the moment of their downfall was not as climactic a moment as it could have been. It’s a bit of a reductionist take on the character to call them an evil bad man who does evil bad things for fun, as there is a fair bit of elaboration by the excerpts from the antagonist’s journal scattered between a handful of chapters, but at the end of the day the antagonist just wasn’t very interesting or a present enough threat to the main cast for me to be particularly invested in their downfall. Sophistry aside: they are an evil bad man who does evil bad things for fun. Many of the conflicts are resolved shockingly quickly, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I wouldn’t go quite as far as to call the morality in the book black and white, but it is quite close. Despite this, I was interested in and enjoyed many of the characters enough for this to not be a significant slight against the book.

I saw the book described as a thriller and I think it certainly deserves that moniker, after I started I only even considered putting the book down once. There were a lot of interesting ideas and themes that I hope will be explored more later into the series, whenever I get around to reading further.