Unwind by Neal Shusterman
My rating: 4/5 cats
this is a great book to use as a springboard for discussions about reproductive rights and governmental responsibility and what kind of world we are creating and leaving to the next generation.
but i’m just going to talk about me. cuz i am a very laissez-faire individual, and i live my life like i am reading a book someone else is writing, and i am just tuning in to see where it all goes, and any discussion of this sort always leads to conflicts, and i think goodreads has enough of those, yeah?
i am of two minds on this book. on the one hand, i got completely sucked into the story, and i love the characters (especially lev), and i thought it was one of the rare dystopian YA books that actually took the time to world-build enough so that its characters made sense in the world they were given. but even at the beginning, i was picking it apart, and finding flaws in the construction; ways that the system could be abused and that just would not work, even as a dystopia. catie’s review goes into a lot of concerns i had, and even though i liked the book a lot more than she did, i agree with a lot of her observations.
i am late to this book’s party, and most of you have already read it, but for the newborns out there who can’t even read yet, i will lay out some of the plot points, so your folks can read them to you.
in this book, abortion is no more. there was a war between the pro-lifers and the pro-choicers which resulted in legislation (apparently only half-seriously proposed) that satisfied both sides: no more fetus-abortion, but parents had the right to “unwind” their unwanted kids once they reached the age of thirteen, but once they turned eighteen, they were there for good. unwinding is a process whereby the kids are used for parts, and nearly every single piece of them is transplanted into a needy recipient, ensuring the donors would “live on”, but in a different state. and all these parts retain the muscle-memory of their previous owners, which seems medically implausible, but who am i to judge? this results in “more surgeons, fewer doctors” because no one needs to be cured anymore, they can just get some spare parts and fix themselves up that way.
for people who are unable to raise their children until the age of thirteen, there is another feature of the legislation that is called “storking,” where unwanted babies are left on the doorsteps of strangers, and THEY HAVE TO RAISE THEM. i mean, it is better than a dumpster, by far, but what a drag. this is the part i had the most problems with. i mean, how easy is it to abuse that law? and i was grateful that he included an anecdote about one such incident that was horrifying, but i can’t see how this was a law that ever got accepted. assuming that financial responsibility for thirteen years at least? no thank you.
but whatever, if i can accept the chinks in divergent’s armor, i can accept this. it is a teen fiction book; it’s not flawless, but this is the world we are given. and it is admirable that he took the time to a) construct such a fully-developed world and b) point out its flaws, occasionally.
and its strengths are numerous. there is great detail-work here, even when it is just given briefly, in the anecdotes of the various unwinds. the variety of reasons a kid can be unwound are numerous and heartbreaking. and just the number of wonderful moments of revelation – View Spoiler »
but overall, i was completely engaged in the story, and i do think the characters grew and became different people, View Spoiler »
overall, i thought it was a great read, and i appreciated the care that went into writing it, even though it is one of those books you have to accept as-is, without going over it with a hyper-critical eye.
