Scythe #
DNFSummary
Thou shalt kill.
A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery.
Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life-and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.
Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.
The greatest achievement of the human race was not conquering death. It was ending government.
My Review
I unfortunately abandoned my reading of Scythe, despite some genuine qualities.
On paper, the world-building is very appealing: a society where death has been conquered, where “Scythes” must decide who has to die in order to regulate the population. The theme is original and raises some great philosophical questions, even though, in the portion I read, this potential remained fairly underexploited.
The novel does, however, deserve credit for offering main characters whose age is finally consistent with their characterization. Here we avoid the recurring YA cliché of the 13-year-old teenager who, with no particular background, already possesses the maturity and expertise of a forty-year-old man. In the same vein, the romance, while present, remains understated and never takes precedence over the plot. This is rare enough to be worth pointing out, since this kind of subplot is usually poorly handled in the genre, with romances that end up overtaking the story to the point of erasing the world-building, and characters who fall in love for no reason other than their looks. Here, it stays in its proper place, which suits me well since I don’t particularly enjoy this type of subplot when it becomes too overwhelming.
The novel’s real problem is its pacing. The plot takes an interminable amount of time to get going: I understand the narrative logic — the characters are in training, and it’s normal for that phase to take time — but almost nothing happens for far too long. On top of that, the characters lack depth, especially the main protagonists, which makes them bland and hard to connect with despite their central importance to the story.
In the end, Scythe remains an enjoyable, undemanding YA read, carried by an appealing world at first glance. But between the slow start and the underdeveloped characters, I couldn’t find the motivation to see it through to the end.