Scythe is a book by Neal Shusterman and the first book in the Arc of a Scythe series. This story is a Sci-fi world that is set in a “utopian” society where death has been eliminated thanks to an almighty AI called the Thunderhead. To keep the population in check, the society before the Thunderhead created a group of people called the scythes whose job is to kill people they deem fit. When this society created the Thunderhead, they gave it one rule to follow which is that it cannot interfere with Scythe business. The story revolves around the two teens Citra Terranova and Rowan Dasmisch, who after a fateful encounter by a Scythe, are appointed to apprentice Scythes by Scythe Faraday. Later on, they fall in love, but they are given a final task to kill each other by a crooked Scythe Goddard. Whoever wins gets to become a Scythe and the other must die. One person ends up winning but allows the other to escape. Later on in the book, the person who won ends up becoming a Scythe and the person who lost is hinted at becoming a Scythe killer who kills crooked Scythes. This novel left me shocked. It raised a lot of unanswered questions (Which were answered in book two of course) and left me on a cliff-hanger. This novel is an excellent contribution to the dystopian genre. The juxtaposition of Scythes and the Thunderhead serves to create a “necessary evil” which the Thunderhead cannot stop. Shusterman uses this flaw in the Thunderhead to create a pathway to a dystopian society which is seen in the later books. Overall, I rate this a 5/5 because of its brilliant conventions and superb storytelling.
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