This was an interesting read. I don't enjoy YA due to the tropes but this one "fail" on that regard which I loved. We follow two characters - two apprentices of being Scythes. Well so what are they?
Well we are on Earth in the future where we've erradicated Death. We are finally immortal. We live and grow old and then go back to being young again. (I've got a lot of questions regarding this) because we've invented a AI that controls our daily live. Since everything is controlled people just have to live, work , do whatever they want and repeat. Unfortunately we still want children and with the enormous stress of over population a group of people called the Scythe exist on Earth and they basically go around killing/gleaming people. Some have some codes, some try to be a bit statistically, some are just mentally disturbed and like killing. They exist, they have rules and people try to live their lives until the day they are gleamed off.
So we've got two young teens who due to some interesting circustances start to be apprentices of Scythe Faraday. There is a politics, interesting views on society, on killing, on relations etc. Everything is okay and apart from some strange things I loved the book...
Let me try to explain what I didn't enjoy or didn't find explaining sufficient
- Why the AI (thunderhead) don't interact with Scythes
- why the scythes are all powerful and nobody really do nothing when some of them are really monsters
- why space traveling was "discontinued"
- why erasing death but replacing with gleaming; wouldn't be more interesting just stop with diseases but leaving death "on"?
- why Faraday choose two scythe apprentices when that was never done?
- why almost every kind of death is sur-passable but not fire? so if you drop yourself from a 100 floor building didn't kill you but fire did?
There are other questions but alas my mind is a bit foggy.
Reading this I have a theory and conviction.. being immortal we become complacent, boring & lack of interest to innovate since we have all the time in the world. That's how I see elves... how come they don't overcome every humans in every art they do? because the danger the fear of death is important to value time and to discover new things... if we already live forever, why rushing? Having said that I would love to live a bit more (double what we live now)
Overall it was good and I will be reading the next two in the next months... I don't want to read back to back. 8,5/10
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