Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I don’t know what to say, except that you need to read this book

Scythe by Neal Shushterman

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CBR 16 Bingo – Tech: Set in the future where they have a lot of new and interesting tech. “My greatest wish for humanity is not for peace or comfort or joy. It is that we all still die a little inside every time we witness the death of another. For only the pain of empathy will keep us human. There’s no version of God that can help us if we ever lose that.” My brother recommended that I read this book and given that […]

Ethical Murderers

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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I picked up Scythe on a whim in a New Year’s sale – my local bookstore had a “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” table and I vaguely remember (it was a long time ago!) enjoying a previous book by the author, Neal Shusterman, so ended up picking this book as my “free” book. This was my first read of this year and also my first Cannonball read book review! I have been lurking for a while but decided to “take the plunge” this year (we’re […]

Big Finish!

The Toll: Arc of a Scythe Book 3 by Neal Shusterman

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This series is outstanding. This final book hit all the right notes and brought its several storylines together in a coherent, exciting and generally satisfying way. My review of Thunderhead indicated that there was a biblical tone to that book, and that tone is even more obvious in The Toll. But this is not a series about religion so much as about human nature, politics and belief. The Toll brings together four storylines. There is the story of Scythe Faraday and his search for the […]

It’s biblical!

Thunderhead: Arc of a Scythe Book 2 by Neal Shusterman

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Thunderhead, the second book in Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy, is a gripping, exciting novel that sets the stage for major conflict in book 3, which I can’t wait to start. Book one introduced the reader to Shusterman’s futuristic world in which all evils seem to have been eradicated: illness, disease, war, crime, even death have been brought under control. In this world, people who meet unfortunate accidents or try to kill themselves can be revived. One is only truly dead when a scythe […]

Dystopian Utopia

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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Imagine a future where war, poverty, crime, illness, disease and death have been conquered. Sounds like paradise, right? But the thing is, without death, the world becomes overpopulated and all the problems return. In Scythe, the first book in a trilogy, Neal Shusterman imagines this world where all knowledge and information is overseen by a god-like universal information storage system called the Thunderhead and where the world population is “managed” by individuals called scythes. Scythes are feared and revered and are an authority unto themselves. […]

Kraft mac-n-cheese, but there’s some ham & broccoli mixed in

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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Scythe, by Neal Shusterman, is a high-concept dystopian YA that came out a little later (2016) than some of the blockbuster successes of the subgenre — which is a damn shame, because it’s extremely competently done. Way way way better than, say, Divergent or The Maze Runner. The world-building premise is that society has conquered natural death thanks to the emergence of an all-governing, all-wise AI called the Thunderhead, and the subsequent development of cures and healing nanites that can revitalize people if they die — […]



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