I mean, in his diary entries all it said was that he wanted the ability to kill without parameters. I didn’t even know why this bad guy was bad. I needed more of them getting to know each other, and becoming friends, and if this was a romance, well I damn sure needed to see that in any quantity because it definitely wasn’t there. They said all of about ten sentences to each other in the book, and yet those small interactions were supposed to make me believe that these two really cared about each other. Now, I did not need this to be a romance, and to be honest I would hesitate to call it that. The writing never made me care about them as people, and the characters just weren’t fleshed out enough for me to really get to know who they were. So the fact that I never felt connected to either of the protagonists was one of the main reasons why I couldn’t fall in love with Scythe. And for me to fall in love with a book I need to actually care about the characters because otherwise what happens to them is not my problem. Neither Citra nor Rowan ever made me feel. Scythe had amazing potential, but for me it just didn’t quite reach it. There were massive time jumps, and the only real aspect of their training we got to see were the three trials, which weren’t even really that interesting. The story is supposed to be about two teens learning to be well, killers, and their ‘lessons’ weren’t even shown. The premise was incredibly interesting and unique but I felt like the execution was a little subpar.

I had heard so many amazing things about Scythe that I went in expecting something amazing. While I did enjoy reading Scythe, I never quite fell in love with it. Only one of them will be chosen as a scythe’s apprentice and as Citra and Rowan come up against a terrifyingly corrupt Scythedom, it becomes clear that the winning apprentice’s first task will be to glean the loser. Citra and Rowan are teenagers who have been selected to be scythes’ apprentices, and despite wanting nothing to do with the vocation, they must learn the art of killing and understand the necessity of what they do. In a world where disease, war and crime have been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed (“gleaned”) by professional scythes. How: A copy of this novel was provided by Walker Books Australia for review.Ī dark, gripping and witty thriller in which the only thing humanity has control over is death. What: Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1) by Neal Shusterman

The scythe series