Wow, this book was excellent! I’ve been meandering through books lately, and haven’t been drawn to a teen novel in a while, but this one really grabbed me and didn’t let me go.

I admit, I felt creeped out from the very beginning of the book—the idea of willfully dividing up teenagers into their component parts to provide materials for other people when they became too much of a burden is disturbing to me, to say the least. I’m sure that’s why the idea hooked into the author too—how could society hit the point where such a practice would be normal?

I was intrigued by the premise, but the elements that kept me with the book were the characters, the questions left unanswered, and the way the whole book turned familiar issues in their heads. I’ve always been a fan of sci-fi that one, reflects our own society back at us, and two, asked questions by showing us a slightly different world, one just a bit askew, and questions how humanity would deal with those changes. Shusterman did a really fine job of addressing a lot of the issues surrounding the Pro-Choice/Pro-Life debate without too much bias. On top of that, Connor, Risa, and Lev felt very real, and I liked how each of them dealt with the possibility of unwinding, and the politics, history, and society involved in unwinding. Not only that, it’s just a solid coming of age for each of them, in very different ways.

I’ve always like science fiction that asks the grander questions along the lines of: just because we can do something, does that mean we should? This book tackles that question and, happily, doesn’t give any easy answers—the reader is haunted, in the best way, by wondering what they would do.
my ‘current-and-recent-reading’ shelf: