In this future you can throw yourself off a roof for the rush of it, hit the pavement, and be back in class on Thursday with new skin and a decent story. The kids who do it are called splats. Nobody dies of anything anymore, not age, not disease, not a twelve-story fall, because the medical technology caught up and then kept going. Shusterman establishes all that in a few pages and then asks the only question left. If death has been beaten, somebody still has to keep the population from eating the planet alive, so who takes that job? The answer is a professional order with robes, rings, and annual quotas, and this book is about two teenagers being trained into it against their will.
Citra Terranova and Rowan Damisch both catch the attention of Scythe Faraday, who takes them on as apprentices even though neither of them wants the work. Faraday is the best case the system can make for itself. He keeps mortality tables from the age when people still died by accident, and he gleans to match them, so a year of his killings reproduces the old statistical shape of chance: this many in car wrecks, this many at the age a heart used to quit. He visits families beforehand. He grants them a year of immunity, collected by kissing his ring, and Shusterman keeps you in the room while a woman puts her lips to the hand of the man who has just told her he is going to kill her son. Nothing in the book explains the Scythedom better than that gesture does.
Running underneath everything is the Thunderhead, the artificial intelligence that grew out of the old cloud and now manages the entire world with genuine care and near-perfect knowledge. It is forbidden by law from touching scythe business. That firewall is the sharpest piece of engineering in the novel, because it means the one institution nobody supervises is the one holding the blades. Give it a few generations and you get Scythe Goddard, who treats gleaning as showmanship, throws parties, and stages mass killings for an audience, while the old guard can do nothing but object at conclave and lose the vote.
Between chapters, Shusterman drops in excerpts from scythes' private journals, which the order requires them to keep. A bureaucracy of killers has to write down its reasons. Those pages carry most of the book's moral weight and let scythes across a century argue with each other about mercy, quotas, boredom, and whether a person who cannot die can still be said to have a life. He also arranges a trap for his apprentices that I will not spoil beyond its shape: only one of them can be ordained, and the terms of that ordination are designed to poison whatever they feel for each other. It is a nasty piece of plotting and it works.
Why you should read
- Dystopian premises with a real philosophical argument inside
- YA that reads perfectly well as adult science fiction
- Corrupt institutions seen from the inside by apprentices
- Worlds where a single rule reshapes everything around it
What to expect
- Short chapters broken up by scythes' journal excerpts
- Cool, controlled prose rather than breathless action
- Violence that is discussed more than it is staged
- A first book that closes cleanly but sets up two more
The romance is the weakest thread here. It reads like a genre obligation rather than something either character needed, and both of them are more interesting when the book leaves them alone with the job. Goddard is broad too, a villain who announces himself. Neither costs the novel much, because the questions underneath keep doing their work: what a culture loses when nothing is at stake, what happens to people handed unaccountable power and a robe to wear while they use it. By the last page the frightening thing has nothing to do with Goddard's theatrics. It is the paperwork. A quota, a ledger of names, a performance review, and an institution fully capable of explaining itself in reasonable prose the whole time it goes rotten.
