Scythe is a stylish YA dystopia, with cool ideas hampered by pedestrian execution in the small things. In the future, human immortality has been achieved, and governance handed over to the Thunderhead, an almost all powerful AI. The last enclave of the old ways are the Scythes, a cadre of killers with a mandate to gleam 250 people per year.

Citra and Rowan are teenagers from the rather aimless mainstream culture with a little bit of moral fiber, which catches the attention of Scythe Faraday (all Scythes name themselves after a historical figure). They're chosen as apprentices, and learn the practical and ethical dimensions of gleaning. How to kill with weapons, hands, poison, and who to kill. Faraday picks his targets based on pre-immortality statistics, with a kind of gentle irony. Curie chooses people who have lost a desire for life and have become stagnant. Faraday and Curie are exemplars of monastic virtue, making death personal. Against them is contrasted Scythe Goddard and his small coterie of 'innovators'. Goddard gleans in mass murders, bloody rampages every few months. He uses the natural fascination with Scythes to put himself in the center of a cult of hedonistic celebrity.

And of course, Citra and Rowan walk right into this mess. It's usual for a single master to take two apprentices, and Citra and Rowan are told that only one of them will become a Scythe, and the first thing they'll do is glean the loser. But they really like each other, and they're decent people. And after a misadventure, Rowan wins up working with Goddard, with a whole situation about corruption in the Scythes and the future of this civilization.

Scythe is a fun book, if about as subtle as a punch to the face. It's also very much a YA novel, with the semi-formed characters and pedestrian notions of good and evil that that implies, but it's a fun read and good enough to sell me on the sequels.