Worth Reading: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There's a summer reading flow chart making the rounds online, in which Unwind is listed under "pro-life." I think that misstates the premise of the book and does it a disservice by (potentially) driving off certain readers.

The actual premise is that the two sides on the abortion debate have become so entrenched in their position that the only compromise possible is a ridiculous Solomonic one, in which no babies can be aborted, but at a certain age children can be given up to become organ donors--all their organs are used when the child is "unwound" so that all of him or her "lives" in other people's bodies. Shusterman, like any good science fiction writer, explores the wide range of consequences:
Babies can be dropped on doorsteps and if you find one, you must keep it--leading parents who find an unwanted baby on their doorstep to surreptitiously move it to someone else's doorstep.
A religious cult raises one child in each family specifically to be unwound, a position of honor in the family.
There's an underground resistance that smuggles kids away who are escaping their unwinding.

Shusterman follows a boy whose family is sending him to be unwound--his shock and pain at his parents doing this, his fear and helplessness, and eventually his escape. He meets a boy who was to be unwound as his family's sacrifice and who struggles to return to his unwinding, and a girl who was raised as a ward of the state and was not quite good enough a musician not to be unwound.

Their stories, and those of the other kids they meet, are intense and involving, and the world in which the story takes place is well drawn and eerily plausible. This is a great book for fans of the Hunger Games series--strong, well-drawn characters fighting for their lives, in a world that demands we look a little more closely at our own. Don't let the facile and inaccurate label on the internet flow chart put you off--this is a compelling read no matter what your position on abortion.



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