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Shusterman deals with some pretty thought provoking and controversial topics in this dystopian tale of teenagers running for their lives to avoid a new world process called unwinding. Essentially a retroactive abortion where parents and state can unwind, or dismember and then donate the parts of their teenagers from the ages of 13 to 18.
Following a civil war where people come to blows over reproductive rights a solution is formed to placate both sides of the debate in the form of new laws providing sanctions on life and in fact defining what life is. The Bill of Life and its accompanying Unwinding accord mandates that life is to be protected from conception until age 13. Between the ages of 13 and 18 however a person can be unwound, taken apart, and all their collective pieces donated to other people at the say so of their guardian. Once an unwind order has been issued there is no undoing it.
The book follows the journeys of three teens, Connor, Risa and Lev all up for unwind for various reasons. The three teens lives becomes entangled as they kick AWOL or run from the unwind fate they have been dealt.
This, as I’ve said, is a very thought provoking book. It touches on many hot topic buttons that divide society today. Abortion, adoption, genocide, organ donation, contraception, religion, existence of a soul, morality, responsibility. For a little book it packs a lot of social issue punch. It’s undeniably an engrossing read. It is uncomplicated in that there is no waffling prose. It’s a bare bones story, aimed at teens, about teens and delivered in a no nonsense way.
I liked this book a lot. I didn’t love this book like I loved The Hunger Games, The Handmaiden’s Tale and Never Let me Go which deal with similar dystopian themes but I did like it. I’m glad I read it, I feel richer for it and I certainly won’t ever forget it.
However the book fell apart for me on a few levels, first it was just a little too YA for me. This, despite the squirmish subject matter, is something I’d give to my 12 year olds to read. It’s that level of book. The size, the chapter length, the print, the words. It’s aimed at the younger side of Young Adult and that is great if you are a young young adult. I’m not and let’s just leave it at that she says as she reaches for the collagen cream.
The world Shusterman created as his stage was a little sparse on details. There wasn’t a lot of universe fleshing and while I can appreciate that this is a relatively short book and character driven I think more information about the kind of world they lived in and how the society came about and functions so at ease with this new moral code would have made it a richer story.
For me as a parent, who has obviously been pregnant and has teenagers, the suspension of disbelief was just too hard. I could not reconcile that any of it would have been likely to have happened because I know as a parent you are biologically driven to make sure your child survives, and the longer they are outside the womb the stronger that drive. No parent of a teen, no matter how horrid; and its been my fortuitous happenstance to raise some particularly diabolical ones, would send their kid off to the chop shop.
Nature > Nurture.
The biological imperative to make sure your child makes it to adulthood makes this whole dystopic scenario seem highly improbable to me. To some emo teen who believed their parents to be emotionally removed uncaring dictator units, this might in fact be a very believable reality. It’s all about reader perspective.
While looking for a book trailer for Unwind I did discover that a film adaptation is currently in production by independent producers. I’d actually quite like to see this book on the big screen, I think it would lend well.