Today I’m linking up with Freda’s Voice and Rose City Reader to bring you The Friday 56 and Book Beginnings. This week’s read is Scythe by Neal Shusterman.
Beginning
We must, by law, keep a record of the innocents we kill.
The Friday 56 – from 56% of the way into my ebook
As much as Rowan tried to deny it, there was logic to Goddard’s approach. After all, what creature in nature despised its own existence and felt shame for its means of survival?
We became unnatural the moment we conquered death, Scythe Faraday would say–but couldn’t that be a reason to seek whatever nature we could find within ourselves?
A Little Bit of Explication (I am an English teacher, after all)
On that beginning – WHAT? If I didn’t know the premise of the story, that line would definitely throw me. I mean, why are people killing innocents? Also, since I’m about 10% into the book already, I know this is part of an aside, ancillary to the primary narrative. This is a mechanic Shusterman has used before – at the beginning of Unwind, he sets the Bill of Life up in the same format. Through drawing that connection to another of his works, the asides from other scythes’ journals are not as jarring.
So what I can gather from the opening sentence is that the Scythes, our future world’s grim reapers, are bound to laws and regulations like any other job. I know their purpose is to keep humanity from reaching population density, but this job still seems particularly callous and cold.
At this point, I’m not sure who Goddard is or how his perspective differs from someone else’s (I’m guessing Scythe Faraday), but the question that Rowan poses is interesting and makes me wonder about his state of mind. I also wonder what’s causing Rowan, who is an apprentice to Scythe Faraday, to question his humanity. And what’s the state of humanity in this world?
the (book) supplier 