Scythe by Neal Shusterman

          For my book of choice in ELA this year, I read Scythe by Neal Shusterman. It was a dystopian story about a world where death and aging had been conquered. There was no disease, and fatal accidents would only render the people "deadish" before they were taken to a revival center, and were good as new in a couple of days. People could also turn their age back to as low as 21 at any time they liked; this was called turning a corner. The only natural killer that still existed was fire, although their security measures against it were so good that death by fire was an extremely rare occurrence. This society also had no government, it instead had an impartial data cloud called the Thunderhead that kept all of the world's information, and upheld the rules. Most of the oldest people living in this society were between 200 and 300 years old, and since death had been conquered for that long, they needed some unnatural means of death to keep the population under control. Very soon after conquering death, the society created the "Scythedom." The scythes were the "wielders of death." They were trained in all forms of martial arts, weaponry, and poisons, and were tasked with killing a certain number of people every year. They were ordered to show no bias in their kills (about 5 a week), which were called "gleanings." Scythes always wore rings, which gave them the power to grant immunity to those that they wished (also without a bias), and they were not allowed to glean other scythes except for themselves.
          As I said before, this story takes place when this society is somewhere around 300 years old. It centers around the stories of two teenagers: Citra Terenova and Rowan Damisch. These two young people are chosen to be the apprentices of Honorable Scythe Michael Faraday (all scythes named themselves after scientists when they were ordained) where they would train for one year, and whoever passed the final test would become a scythe, and the other could go back to their previous life. However this quickly changed. The scythes held a regional meeting every 4 months (their region was MidMerica), and at this first meeting, it was decided that whoever was ordained as a scythe would have to glean the other as their first act as a scythe. To keep this from happening, Scythe Faraday gleans himself, but this ends up with Citra apprenticed to H.S. Curie, and Rowan apprenticed to H.S. Goddard. They then continue to train until the end of the book where one of them is ordained as a Scythe...
          That is the main plot of this book, but there is a little more that is important to the story. Rowan and Citra were both chosen to be scythes because most of the scythes believed that scythes needed to hate killing people, and have a moral high ground. However, there were some scythes, like Scythe Goddard and his followers that believed that they should be able to kill as many as they liked, and that scythes should enjoy killing people. These two ideals create a lot of rifts in the scythedom, and it creates a lot of tension between different people in this book.
          I really enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it to others who enjoy reading fantasy. The plot was very interesting. It was very detailed, and I really liked how it showed how different groups of people reacted to different parts of society. Their reactions felt very real, and seemed like they were almost exactly how our current society would react to the aspects of this society. I also really liked the setting of this book. This society is very, very far away from what we have today, so it is hard to relate it to yourself, the setting was very relateable because it was set in the US, parts of it was set in a high school, and a lot was set in different parts of a relatively normal feeling city, with a lot of diversity of living conditions and viewpoints. Towards the end of the book, there was a part set in more Southern America, and it was very interesting to see how these two regions reacted to each other. The thing that I did not really like about this book was the characters. I did not learn enough about them at the beginning, so they were very boring for the rest of the book. They did not feel very human. They did not have very much personality. I think that if the author had spent a little more time explaining them before the main story started, and if the author had given them more characteristics they would have been more interesting. They just did not seem very human to me, because all of their personalities seemed to have only one aspect to them, instead of various ones like normal humans.
         Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I am really glad I read it. I would recommend it for anyone who likes to read fantasy and dystopian novels.