Hello!

My name is Bianca and today I want to talk about what is probably my favorite
book series of all time. It’s actually a trilogy called “Arc of a Scythe Series”, written by Neal
Shusterman, and I have yet to finish the last book.
The action is set in the distant future around 200 to 300 years from now on. One of the
first things I noticed is how good the world building is. The author is establishing the rules of his
world bit by bit, chapter by chapter, so as the new information doesn’t become overwhelming
to the readers. I’ll try to sum it up. As it is in every sci-fi piece of media, they have very
advanced technology. Here the world is ruled by an AI, which may sound bad at first, but
reading the books I realized that it would solve a lot of problems such as corruption. I’ll come
back to this aspect of the books later.
Also, in this universe, humans have achieved immortality, which raises an obvious
problem: overpopulation. This is where something called the “scythedom” comes in. They are a
group of people who are tasked with killing a set number of humans each year, in order to try
to keep a natural balance somehow. They also dress in robes resembling the Grim Reaper, but
there are colorful and not black. Anyway, the plot of the books follows a girl and a boy who
went training to become sythes (that is a person from the “scythedom” which I mentioned
above). As you might expect, there is a romantic subplot between the two. This probably the
only part of the books that I disliked. I think it felt forced and unnecessary.
I don’t want to spoil the story too much, but a large portion of it is about politics in this
universe. As I said before, humans programmed an AI, called the Thunderhead, to make the
best decisions for humanity. Maybe in other stories this choice would have backfired and we
would have some sort of generic evil robot takeover, but here humans are the ones causing
troubles. There’s one part in book two, where the Thunderhead describes how it can’t be the
one that decides who die since that would go against his programming to help every person. So
this task remains up to humans, more specifically the scythedom, which is, as pictured by the
books, very prone to corruption. In book three, there is a part where the antagonists literally
talk about how to change the law and make a loophole, in order for them to discriminate some
categories of people.
Speaking of which, during the second book, after each chapter, we get to read a page or
two worth of Thunderhead’s thoughts. This was very interesting because a lot of this fragments
describe humanity’s evolution. In this universe, the problems of homelessness, world hunger,
climate change, discriminations don’t exist anymore. For example, for the first two, every
human has a small apartment and an income insured, so they could live even if they don’t have
any job. However, humans who do have one make a lot more money, so they can afford more
luxury, but no one dies if they don’t. This aspect of the books, really made me realize that there
are many wrong things with our current society.
 To sum it all up, “Arc of a Scythe Series” is a very well written trilogy of books, which
addresses important world problems while still being entertaining and I would recommend it to
any sci-fi book lover.