Curie states, “We must, by law, keep a record of the innocents we kill. The first entry from the gleaning journal of H. The following questions may be utilized throughout the study of Scythe as targeted questions for discussion and reflection, or alternatively, they can be used to as reflective writing prompts.ġ. And when it becomes clear that the winning apprentice’s first task will be to glean the loser, Citra and Rowan are pitted against each other in a fight for their lives. Only one of them will be chosen as a scythe’s apprentice. Citra and Rowan are teenagers who have been selected to be scythe’s apprentices, and despite wanting nothing to do with the vocation, they must learn every method of ending life and come to understand the necessity of what they do. In a world where disease has been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed (“gleaned”) by professional reapers (“scythes”). Two teens must learn the “art of killing” in the first book in a chilling new series from Neal Shusterman, author of the New York Times bestselling Unwind dystology. And if there is some eternal world after this one, what fate awaits a taker of lives? I understand why there are scythes, and how important and how necessary the work is… but I often wonder why I had to be chosen. The ending of human life used to be in the hands of nature. We have one very limited world, and although death has been defeated as completely as polio, people still must die.

It’s not as if we can go somewhere else the disasters on the moon and Mars colonies proved that. All of that is behind us now, and yet a simple truth remains: People have to die. It’s hard for most of us to imagine a world so unsafe, with dangers lurking in every unseen, unplanned corner. Aging couldn’t be reversed, and there were accidents from which there was no return. There were invisible killers called “diseases” that broke the body down. Old age used to be a terminal affliction, not a temporary state. And knowing that it is for the greater good doesn’t make it any easier. It is the most difficult thing a person can be asked to do.

The arc of a scythe trilogy