Personal Rating: 4 Stars Goodreads Rating: 4.37 Stars Content Rating: R (for violence) Book Trigger Warnings: Suicide 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. (goodreads.com) This is one of those books that everyone kept telling me I should read, and I was intrigued by the cover, but didn’t actually think I’d get around to reading. Do you have books like that? Where it seems like it’s everywhere and everyone recommends it to you but you’re pretty sure you’ll never actually read it? For me, there are certain books like that and I keep saying that I’ll check it out but then I never do because my TBR list is getting to look like one of those comically long scrolls in a movie. But obviously, I did end up reading Scythe and that is because some coworkers (*waves* hi coworkers!) and I have been talking about doing a book club forever and we decided to finally give it a go for January. Some of them had already read it, but the third book in the trilogy just came out so they wanted to reread the first two anyway. So I finally picked it up, and boy let me tell you, I’m glad I did. I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump lately so it feels like it took me forever to finish reading it. Sometimes I can just read for hours and hours on end and devour every book in sight, but lately I’ve had to force myself to sit down and pick up a book. This was the case with Scythe for me, even though whenever I would actually read it I wouldn’t want to put it down. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’m just rambling. Let’s get a move on with this review. Okay, so, the premise of this is super creepy to me. Like, people can’t die and we have to have assigned killers? That’s messed up my dudes. I get that it would be nice to do away with disease and untimely deaths, but to get rid of all natural death seems like a bad idea. I won’t get into the politics of this or anything because we ain’t got time for that, but it just seems like a dangerous idea. Which is probably why this is dystopian—the genre of bad ideas dressed up like good ones. The premise already makes for a great story and then the plot did a fantastic job of playing it out. I can’t wait to see what cracks there are in the system in the next two books. Because that’s always the way of it, isn’t it? The heroes find all of the problems with the system and then everything goes wack-a-doodle and we get all kinds of wonderful drama and possibly horrible character deaths. All I can say is that I’m excited to see where this will go. Let’s talk characters. We have two main ones, Citra and Rowan. Both teenagers, both apprentice scythes, and both uncertain that they actually want to be in their positions. Personally, I liked Rowan’s character arc better than Citra’s. I feel like he went through more and that he actually changed over the course of the book. He had more to deal with and tougher decisions to make, which lead to him becoming someone very different than he was at the beginning of the book while still maintaining his core as a character. I liked Citra too, but I just felt that she didn’t really change. Stuff happened to her, but she didn’t let it affect her much. And that was fine. It was actually refreshing from other dystopian heroines who completely throw away who they were at the beginning of the book, but I do wish that Citra had been shaped more by her circumstances. Am I contradicting myself? Perhaps. I don’t want to say much about other characters because of possible spoilers so we’ll leave it at that. The plot twists in this book were really enjoyable. The first big twist really caught me by surprise and I both loved and hated it. After that the twists were a little bit more predictable, but still exciting. Something else highly entertaining about this book was the shock factor of being thrown into this world where no one can die. People did absurdly dangerous and deadly things because they could be brought back. It was like they were in a video game where they already completed the objective so you might as well see what kind of crazy things you can do, knowing there is no consequence for anything that would be fatal in real life. Because of this, it’s definitely jarring for the reader to see characters doing insane things like jumping off buildings for the rush. All in all, I enjoyed Scythe. I liked the main characters, I hated the bad guy, and I’m hooked enough that I will have to pick up the next two books shortly. Thanks for reading, I’m off to shelve books and be extremely glad that I work in libraries and not for the Scythedom. Until next time! Image sources: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28954189-scythe?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=4GRygrnHii&rank=1 https://giphy.com/gifs/list-F0QWePzwQRewM
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