Immortality does not blatantly encourage people to stop aspiring, but it makes it easier to do. The more time Citra spends with Faraday and Curie, the more she comes to appreciate the galvanizing effect that mortality has on those who wish to express themselves, to thrive, and to avoid stagnation. Award-winning author Neal Shusterman grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he began writing at an early age.

Progress for its own sake, and learning for the joy of learning, have been vanquished just as death has. There are fewer reasons to pursue education, or art, or to save money, at least on any given time frame, because if one can expect hundreds of years of life, procrastination becomes easier to justify. The first book in Neal Shusterman’s breathtaking Arc of a Scythe trilogy (and our December YA Book Club Selection), Scytheintroduces readers to a dystopian world in which humanity has found a way to banish every scourge imaginablefrom hunger and disease, to war. In the Skinjacker trilogy, kids who die linger in Everlost, a limbo made up of all of the things and places that no longer exist in the living world. Without the pressure of impending death, humans have less urgency to strive and struggle. Before Neal Shusterman wrote Arc of the Scythe, he gave us the Skinjacker trilogy, and it won’t surprise you to know that it also has a lot to do with death. Curie’s journal reveals more of her thoughts on stagnation. She sees it in their eyes when there is no energy left. She sees it in the way they walk or in their tattered and scuffed clothes.

As they walk, Curie asks her to observe people who seem stagnant, or those who seem ready to be finished with life. When Citra begins her apprenticeship with Curie, she fines that Curie is less structured in her approach to selecting people to glean that Faraday was.

Scythe by neal shusterman