Unwind (Unwind, Book 1)
By: Neal Shusterman
My Rating: Three out of Five Stars
Best for: 14 and Up

I’m gonna give this a “meh.”

Unwind has been on my Mount TBR for years, and I finally decided to give it a try because I loved Scythe, another Neal Shusterman book (that I highly recommend).

Why did I leave it sitting on Mount TBR, lonely and unread? Because it’s about a society where parents who are tired of their angsty teenagers sign them over to the State to be killed in human chop shops and stripped of their body parts.

Um…No.

Not saying I haven’t imagined some…alternatives…for my teenagers when they act like teenagers, but this felt too wrong and too close to home for me. So I set it aside.

Anyway, Scythe takes a sensitive subject and turns it into something plausible, so I thought maybe Unwind might work out the same way.

Sadly, it doesn’t. It starts cringe, stays cringe, and ends cringe.

I can totally see this book being attractive to actual teenagers whose parents (and the entire world) don’t understand them and are actively working to prevent their happiness.

This book is for you! It’s written well, its plot pulled me along, and I was interested in the outcome.

But I struggled MIGHTILY with the notion that any society…even a fictional, dystopian future society, would ever be able to justify and pass off as normal using teenagers as spare parts. Cover to cover, I couldn’t get my head around the non-plausibility of the premise of this book.

This book is not for me. Because I love my kids. Even my teenagers.

Especially my teenagers. Angst and all.

So there you go, Neal Shusterman fans. Well written and interesting. I didn’t like what it was about. Maybe you’ll find your mind is more open than mine and you’ll enjoy it.

No violence or sex. A bit of language. Discussion on abortion and when a life becomes a life, but no answers implied.

14 and up.

Happy reading!