Another brilliant read by Mr Shusterman, who is becoming one of my favourite YA authors, his stories are always new, unique and interesting.

Set place in the future, us humans have managed to eradicate disease, ageing and even suicide, they have even put a stopper in death itself!

Obviously if you cannot die then the world would become over populated, this is where the Scythes come in.

Scythes are death, they are trained in the art of death, you don't know when it will be, but one day while you are sitting around the table having your evening meal with your family, or on the way to work on the bus, or driving your car, you will be met, and killed by a Scythe!

But who chooses who is going to die?, well the world is now being run by an AI called The Thunderhead, the Scythes are instructed and they will find you to "Gleen" you, the only way that you can actually die, or they can randomly choose someone, after all they do have targets to meet!

Because of this the Scythes are treated as celebrities, they will never have to wait in line, or pay for their meals, they are waited on hand and foot, presumably to try and get a pardon from them.

After finding a couple of teenagers that Scythe Faraday deem to be suitable for apprenticeships, Rowan and Citre have big decisions to make, do they take the job, do they want to be killers? If they do then they can get immunity for their family, but it is a big gamble to take, because only one of them can be a Scythe, so what happens to the loser?

I loved the world building in this story, and Shusterman always plants the 'What if' seed into all of his stories, they make great BookClub reads.

🎧🎧 - Brilliantly narrated by Greg Tremblay, I can't wait to read the next book in the series