Scythe by Neal Shusterman – Spoiler Free Review

Review Header Image

Title: Scythe
Author: Neal Shusterman
Series Name: Arc of a Scythe
Genre: YA Sci-Fi
Publication Date: Nov 22nd, 2016
Pages: 443 (Paperback)
Publishers: Walker Books
Rating:

Blog titles (20)

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.

scythe-book-cover-neal-shusterman

Blog titles (29)

I just love this book honestly. But the writing is definitely my favourite part. This book makes you question so many things. For one, you can vividly see how this could be us in the future, which is scary as hell honestly. There is a lot of discussions around morality and mortality/immortality in this book. It just basically makes you question everything and I loved it.

The world building is amazingly done. Like I said it is extremely vivid because of how close to reality it is but also all those differences just stand out. We basically learn through Citra & Rowan being bought into the world of the Scythes and also through the Scythe Journal Entires.

Speaking of the Scythe Journal Entries, I really enjoyed them. They always gave you that bit of background, something to think about and just let you dive a little deeper into the mind of that specific person.

Blog titles (30)

While the plot was a bit slower at times, there were enough twists and turns to keep me interested. Besides one major thing that I guessed before even picking up the book, the plot was not predictable. Whenever there was a twist, it was generally something extremely shocking and there was no way to prepare for that thing to happen!

Blog titles (31)

We follow two POV in this book, Citra & Rowan. While I did enjoy Citra as a character a bit more than Rowan, I did like reading from Rowan’s POV because of his situation.

Citra is a more of the strong and intelligent one and then Rowan is a little questionable at times. He goes through a tonne of character development and while I didn’t always agree with how that was turning out there were times when I 100% agreed with his choices.

As for the Scythes, we have our ‘good guys’ & our ‘bad guys’. Scythe Faraday was an interesting character and I enjoyed his methods. It just felt like there were more thought and reasoning behind Faraday’s choices than some of the others.
Scythe Curie is a wise woman and can usually judge what is best. She is loyal and caring and I really enjoyed her.

As for the ‘bad guys’, while I wouldn’t like them as people as they are horrible, I did enjoy them as characters. They were very well done and you couldn’t help but hate them. However, I did find myself agreeing with some of the main ‘bad guy’s opinions, I didn’t agree with his methods though. He also totally got what was coming for him.

The only weak point of this book is the romance. It quite simply didn’t feel natural. I found them connecting as characters but it kinda jumps straight into a potential romance and it just didn’t feel right.

Blog titles (32)

I loved everything about this book excluding the romance. It is such an interesting, unique and well developed world. The characters are amazingly done and the plot is a little slow but worth it for all the twists and turns throughout! Highly recommend.

Copy of Goodreads Synopsis