finished reading

I enjoyed this YA dystopian/utopian novel. The world-building is fantastic, and the characters are quite well-developed and distinct (and thankfully, the parents and adults are not bumbling idiots). In this futuristic society, there is no natural death, so a squad of professional scythes manages the population—it makes sense in the story, even if it's hard to describe briefly!

In some of the reading I've done about this series, it is categorized as a romance; however, this book is light on romance, focusing much more on platonic love than desire. The central characters recruited as scythe apprentices, Citra and Rowan, come from very different backgrounds. Through a series of events, they are re-apprenticed from Faraday, a compassionate scythe, to two other scythes with competing moral codes. And that's where the action really takes off.

Overall, the pace of the book is a bit uneven, as some repetition and overly detailed descriptions slow the action down. But once the twists occur, the plot wildly careens to a cliffhanger ending.

From the publisher:

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.