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I picked up SCYTHE because it's been so heavily touted in the #YALit Twitter community. I was very excited to pick it up, but...the reading bit was less exciting and more a spotty experience for me.
Bad news first: while I understood Shusterman was trying to establish that humanity now lived in an immortal utopia, there was a heaping amount of ableism and racism in the background, and it was unclear whether this was meant to be a critique of the utopia or not, which made the book lose stars for me. You can't change the the thousands of years of tradition behind the Chinese lunar calendar because you like ocelots. You can't say racism and our concept of ethnicity is over when people keep track of what percent white they are, and people are gleaned based on statistics from a known racist time period. You can't pat yourself on the back for eliminating mental and physical ailment when you have sociopaths running around with flamethrowers. Or when you genetic and nanite tweak all of the disabled people out of the population.
In fact, you can't really say you're a utopia at all, when you have society-sanctioned assassins running around killing people. When reading your world is pages upon pages of you moaning about how bored you are that your world is so great interspersed with scenes of gruesome and intense mass murder. Noooope.
The good news: I quite like the main characters and the meditation on death. Citra, Rowan, Curie, Faraday: they were all relatable, kind heroes. I loved that Rowan had the typically feminine trait of high empathy, while Citra had the typically masculine competitive, headstrong nature. I rooted and mourned for them all, for who they were and who they grew to be. Faraday and Curie's compassionate take on death was downright beautiful and sacred. I ate up all the training scenes. I devoured Curie's diary entries. The three stars I gave this book belong to those scenes, and those characters.
So where does that leave me? I might pick up the next book, to see if Shusterman complicates and/or destroys his utopia, but I won't be the first in line. I wished I could like SCYTHE more, but I don't.
Bad news first: while I understood Shusterman was trying to establish that humanity now lived in an immortal utopia, there was a heaping amount of ableism and racism in the background, and it was unclear whether this was meant to be a critique of the utopia or not, which made the book lose stars for me. You can't change the the thousands of years of tradition behind the Chinese lunar calendar because you like ocelots. You can't say racism and our concept of ethnicity is over when people keep track of what percent white they are, and people are gleaned based on statistics from a known racist time period. You can't pat yourself on the back for eliminating mental and physical ailment when you have sociopaths running around with flamethrowers. Or when you genetic and nanite tweak all of the disabled people out of the population.
In fact, you can't really say you're a utopia at all, when you have society-sanctioned assassins running around killing people. When reading your world is pages upon pages of you moaning about how bored you are that your world is so great interspersed with scenes of gruesome and intense mass murder. Noooope.
The good news: I quite like the main characters and the meditation on death. Citra, Rowan, Curie, Faraday: they were all relatable, kind heroes. I loved that Rowan had the typically feminine trait of high empathy, while Citra had the typically masculine competitive, headstrong nature. I rooted and mourned for them all, for who they were and who they grew to be. Faraday and Curie's compassionate take on death was downright beautiful and sacred. I ate up all the training scenes. I devoured Curie's diary entries. The three stars I gave this book belong to those scenes, and those characters.
So where does that leave me? I might pick up the next book, to see if Shusterman complicates and/or destroys his utopia, but I won't be the first in line. I wished I could like SCYTHE more, but I don't.