Scythe by Neal Shusterman: Plot holes ruin everything

Scythe 

by 

Neal Shusterman

Technology has become so advanced that humanity has eradicated disease, hardship and death itself. Nowadays a person has nanites in their blood which regulate pain and accidental deaths can be erased by a trip to a revival center. Heck if they get too old they can ‘turn the corner’ and return to the age of twenty-one. Effectively humanity as a whole is immortal. And their lives are now focused more on keeping themselves entertained for the next thousand years than actually struggling for anything.

Because of this human overpopulation has become the only problem that humanity can’t fix. At least until they create an order of people called Scythes who are responsible for randomly killing so many people a year. Enter our protagonists Citra and Rowan who become apprenticed to the local Scythe. The only question now is can they survive the morally grey world of sanctioned murder.

Characters

Citra: I honestly don’t know how to describe Citra. I have zero strong feelings for or against her in all honesty. She didn’t annoy me, which is nice. But she didn’t inspire me, interest me or affect me at all really. I suppose it's better than driving me crazy like some YA heroines. Buuuut it’s not ideal. Ultimately I don’t think Citra is a bad character exactly. It’s just that it’s getting very hard to create unique characters and for someone who reads a lot of similar books they all start to run together.

Rowan: He was slightly more compelling than Citra. Mostly because he started out as the ‘morally righteous’ one and eventually slipped into more of an anti-hero role. It wasn’t the subtlest of changes by any means. And it certainly wasn’t masterfully illustrated but at least I remember his character’s arc more than I remember Citra’s.

Some thoughts because everything is so convoluted that I can’t actually separate it into ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’.

Dystopians are just depressing

 I know that there’s been quite a backlash against reading for escapism. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve been told that you shouldn’t read books ‘just for fun’ I’d be a billionaire. But you know what? I’ve had quite enough of people telling me that I’m ‘reading the wrong way’ and I’m just gonna say it. Yes, I read books to escape/do things I can’t/feel things I can’t etc.  No, I’m not going to apologize, defend or even argue about this anymore. 

Given that, I don’t like dystopian books.

              Their purpose is to portray the worst of humanity. Most effectively induce feelings of despair and a complete lack of faith in humanity. 

Frankly, I experience quite enough of that in real life 

so they have zero draw for me. Scythe is no exception. I would literally take a break from this book because the hopeless ‘there’s no point to life’ feelings just depressed the heck out of me. I even played silly music for the last two hundred pages just to get through it. Now this is clearly a very personal dislike/thing-y so I completely understand if nobody agrees with me.

This is clearly a book that skated by on it’s premise

 I mean it’s a dystopian that isn’t about star crossed lovers and bringing down the oppressive government (well there’s a little bit of that). And there wasn’t one, but two! Different moral quandary’s that could have filled an entire book separately. One being what’s the point of a life without struggle that never freakin’ ends. The second being the killing of a few to save billions. There’s some heavy questions for ya. But because that premise is so interesting the less than stellar bits of the story can usually be ignored. Except when the premise is dashed to pieces by cold hard logic.

The Ginormous plot hole

 Look, if you’re still interested in reading this book I’d suggest stopping here. Because I noticed this giant plot hole about forty pages in and it ruined any chance of enjoying this book whatsoever. The premise was completely destroyed and by proxy the conflict was as well. Without those two unique aspects the rest of the book was just too par for the course to hold up on its own.

You have been warned, now scurry.

Anyway. So, the main antagonist of the book is a scythe who is far too happy to dole out painful sanctioned death to anyone and everyone. Because what else was going to happen when you literally created an un-killable, un-arrest-able serial killer? I’m sure nobody saw that coming. But ultimately the world doesn’t need scythes at all. Their problem is that people live forever so there’s overpopulation. Then just limit the amount of time people can ‘turn the corner’. Heck you could even integrate the scythes stupid ‘random’ policy and randomly select people who would be banned from the process. They’d die a peaceful death from old age and people wouldn’t have the threat of power drunk murders running around.

              Doesn’t that make so much more sense? I thought it did. And because of that I couldn’t bring myself to take any of the conflict seriously because I saw a way that it could be completely avoided. So there you go, the book was completely ruined by fun killing logic.

Honestly my dislike of the book is completely my own fault. I appreciate it’s attempt to ask thought provoking questions and even applaud it for instilling such a powerful emotion in me that lasted long after I finished the book, because that is extremely impressive. Even if that emotion is a feeling of depressing irrelevance. So if that’s the thing you get into, go for it! I can totally see why somebody would. As for me I need to go find something happy to read to cheer myself up.