Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1)

by Neal Shusterman

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On one hand I’m very happy with this book but on the other hand I wish there were some aspects that happened differently in it.

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To me this book was very easy to get into, I always have a sense of wary when trying out a book from an author I’ve never tried before but thankfully Neal Shusterman makes it pretty easy for me to get hooked with his writing style. As it should be there is no excessive silliness that comes with this, either from the dialogue or the scenes. Some play some things off for sure but if you just stop to think about it, it’s really not a joke. Afterwards I met the first sort of lacking aspect about the book, world building. Neal Shusterman gives a somewhat basic rundown of how this world is, the entities in it, countries, the new rules, examples of how Scythes do their job, the important quarterly events, “Deadish” and several others, but at the end of the day it leaves me wanting to learn so much more about the background of this world, which unfortunately wasn’t as excessive as I hoped it would be.

That being said, the book can be followed very easily without any of the extra information that I hoped to get for the sole reason that the focus of the story revolves around our two teenagers and their life in this new situation which can be (and is) told without excessive world building. The way they went about the Scythes + Rowan and Citra’s apprenticeship was something I really enjoyed, I love journeys and this was a very enjoyable one to follow for me. There is nothing that sucks more than finding myself at the end of the test without feeling like I’ve seen these kids grow and develop (which wasn’t something I experienced here), while the certain developments they had can be sadly seen from a mile away, it thankfully didn’t take that much away from my enjoyment.

Personally I didn’t have that huge of a problem with the way Neal Shusterman depicted his villain, I’ve seen and read enough to know that this book doesn’t really revolve around the villain because they are going to send chills down my spine (I did have a teensy tiny hope that this one would too but meh), but with the change their existence is going to set in motion. The issue here for me is how it made one of our apprentices make this unbelievable change in battle prowess that it borderlines bs and ruins the image of authority and power the book spent hundreds of pages building already. When I have a teenager who’s only been handling weapons for a year easily defeat masters who have been doing it for hundreds of years it’s just ridiculous. It could very well happen because raw talent is still a massive factor but making it happen this easily? This is where I draw the line because of how utterly pathetic it makes the veterans look like.

After this we go to the next issue in the book, romance. I know it’s a YA and it’s obligatory to have a romance but why add something extra to something great without it? Especially if that romance feels like an afterthought that was added because of the demographic? It’s also not done in a way that shows a focus on other aspects of the book, you know like cleverly hiding a romantic subplot here or there that some authors do while they focus on the more important parts of the plot. Here it happens because “I have a teenage girl and a teenage boy in the same vicinity” no real reason why those two would ever be attracted to each other, no reason why they would “continue” to be attracted to each other and lastly no reason for them to continue to believe in the goodness of the other. Of course I can make the argument that this happened BECAUSE they are in the same situation but I just can’t with the way Neal Shusterman went about this apprenticeship.

This book would’ve been so much better without that being added in, to me of course since I’m sure that there is a target audience to this somewhere. It’s technically easy to see where we are going from here, but having that title for the sequel makes me very excited. At first “Thunderhead” didn’t make a shred of sense but after this book, I’m so ready to read that sequel. I honestly hope that there are more twists and turns in said sequel and of course more work in the world building department to satisfy my selfish desire to learn more about the world than the teens lol. My second selfish desire would be more “Curie”, I want to know more about that for sure.

Final rating: 3/5