Scythe, by Neal Shusterman | Book Review #217

‘Thou shalt kill.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.’

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TRIGGER WARNING: Self Harm, Suicide, & Murder.

Scythe is the first book in the Arc of a Scythe duology? Trilogy? I don’t know.

In Scythe there are two different points of view. The first coming from Citra, and the second coming from Rowan. I didn’t know what to expect in Scythe, since it’s such a different kind of novel, where most of the worlds problems are solved. Almost like a Utopia kind of book. Yet the premise of Scythe contradicts my Utopian predictions. 

It took me so long to read this book. I’m not even kidding. I ended up giving Scythe back to the library 5 days after it was due because I was just so pissed off at this novel and wanted to extract my revenge on Scythe by finishing the book. Some revenge artist I am, huh. Hahahaha.

What I thought was interesting about Scythe was that it seems like the worlds’ problems have all come to an end. World hunger? Fixed. Plagues and diseases? Gone, who needs ’em. I mean, these people don’t even catch colds. There’s no wars, and there’s no world misery. For that matter, it seems like everyone is content. — When I heard and read about this book my thoughts were “How interesting. I think I’ll give that one a try.” And requested Scythe from the library.

Let me just say that I am extremely glad that I borrowed Scythe from the library. If I hadn’t, well, then I probably wouldn’t have read this book. Lets say that I bought this book though, I’d probably have returned it about 150 pages in.

At first, I thought that Citra’s view was the only view we’d read from, but then I remembered that there was also Rowan that we’d get the chance to meet.

I actually really enjoyed reading from Citra’s point of view. ..Not only is her name pretty, but she’s competitive, and has an attitude to match. Citra is a little like me in the competitive way. If Scythe was read from only Citra’s point of view, I think that I would have enjoyed this book waaaay more that I actually did.

While Rowan was an interesting character, I found that I didn’t enjoy reading from his point of view on things. Rowan was dull, and incredibly…lenient, in his own way. That made me not like Rowan at all. I honestly don’t care for Rowan’s character.

With both Rowan’s and Citra’s points of view on things, the story moves incredibly slowly. Yet the story also moves incredibly quickly. It wasn’t until the very last half of the book that the action and story started to pick up. For me, the story moves agonizingly slowly during the beginning and middle parts of Scythe. And when it was slow, I hate to say it, but, the story was becoming a little dull. I can’t even begin to count how many times I almost gave up on the book. Seriously. I just wanted to return Scythe to the library and forget that Scythe was even a book.

However, Scythe has a nice premise, and I wanted to find out what would happen at the end of the book. So without just flipping to the end of the novel to find out what happens, I read the book. In doing so, I found that the story does get interesting towards the end! Which was really the only thing that in my opinion, made this book interesting again. There are a few twists in the plot that seem desperate, but also fit the book and where (I hope) this story is going pret-ty well.

What I liked about this book was that the author has depicted that Death in this book anyway, has the same standing as that of a tax worker. Which is honestly hilarious. And since no one can naturally die anymore, this world is bound that have quite a few Scythes around to pick up our own slack.

After all of this, I have got to say that I’m glad that I finished reading Scythe. This book wasn’t the story I’d thought it’d be, but even then I didn’t know what Scythe would entail.

I ended up giving Scythe 1 of 5 stars on Goodreads.

Have you read Scythe? What did/do you think of the story?

I actually ended up learning a new word from reading this book. The word is: Pernicious.

Happy Reading!
Adele

‘Sometimes, the weight of my job becomes overwhelming, I begin to lament all the things lost when we conquered death. I think about religion and how, once we became out own savours, our own gods, most faiths became irrelevant. What must it have been like the believe in something greater than oneself? To accept imperfection and look to a rising vision of all we could never be? It mist have been frightening. It must have lifted people from the mundane, but also justified all sorts of evil. I often wonder in the right benefit of belief outweighed the darkness it’s abuse could bring.’