So in conclusion, this book is shitty prolife propaganda by someone who’s prolife but not fanatic about it because he doesn’t see what the big deal is, really. It opens by saying that the world it presents, where abortions are banned in return for killing older kids for organs, is the result of a compromise between prolife and prochoice people, and while it will never work up the guts to actually say it directly, this means that murdering older children from organs has to be the demand of the prochoice side, because we know the prolife side’s demand was to stop abortions.
Then for some reason it insists evil is really about caring about things instead of just going along with what the government tells you, and that people who deliberately fight back are the real monsters. I think the sickest part of this is it actually does admit women can get pregnant and it’s not their fault with Risa, but it doesn’t care, because if Risa actually was raped and got pregnant, she’d be worthless and we shouldn’t care what happens to her. Besides, what about the fetus’ bodily rights? Especially when unlike Risa, it’d still be a virgin.
I really don’t have the stomach to go through and summarize things in any more detail than that. Point is, the book is terrible and the author is terrible.
Last break for this I went through all the different sorts of stories you could tell with the basic idea, and let’s now demonstrate you could tell this exact plotline without it being terrible. Let’s go over just how utterly this failed solely on narrative grounds.
The opening starts off the long string of shit we see this book is composed of. The primary plot of this book is about a hypothetical future of murdering teenagers for parts. The author first chose to tie this nonsensically to abortion, then chose to blame “both” sides of the issue about this, and then topped it off by, as I’ve ranted throughout this book, making it the prochoice side that’s to blame for the childmurdering.
So: fuck that shit.
This is a book about murdering kids for their parts. There. We’re done. You’re not going to be able to explain this as an actual logical outgrowth of anything in our world, but it works as a dystopia. The fucking moron of an author supposedly wanted this to be taking place in an “indeterminate” time, which explains why it’s obviously the future and you’ve got people talking about ancient ipods, but it’s also got pawn shops where kids sell their baseball cards. Not trying to pretend this is the future also avoids that particular bit of incompetent stupidity.
Our protagonist is either Risa or Lev, because seriously, what the fuck was Connor adding? So, either we start with Risa horrifying us with the idea of getting killed for budget reasons, or Lev explaining how great it is getting murdered. No stupid Connor easing us into it with whining and sociopathy. The book has one single POV, with maybe some dips into omniscient but I don’t think those are needed. The multiple viewpoints just diluted everything.
Connor still exists, mind you. But he’s just there to cause trouble, sometimes helpful trouble and sometimes trouble for them.
Risa’s story has her escaping the bus and running across Connor dragging Lev. She displays actual human emotions regarding dealing with a kid who, on the one hand, is going to die if they leave him, but on the other, wants that to happen. I mean, Risa didn’t exactly try to drag the other suicidal unwind off her bus. She didn’t even argue, she was just creeped out.
Lev’s story has him being kidnapped by Connor and freaked out by that. No pastor yelling at him. Why the fuck did the author think that was a good idea? That just made Lev go on about how confused he was when everyone reading it understood just fine, which is annoying. So no, he’s just straight up kidnapped and dragged off. Without the other viewpoints, his view of the other two as criminals will seem more reasonable – play up how nasty they seem. POV is everything.
THEN THEY ACTUALLY TRY TO SURVIVE IN THE WOODS, DAMMIT. Not negotiable! It’s late summer, right at the start of school, and it’ll be explained this is because it’s a traditional time to send kids off for murdering around now. They get to enjoy a last summer vacation, and there’s no point in educating organ sacks. Late summer/early fall is a comparatively easy time to be trying to survive. Connor or Risa can be carrying a lighter, which will get them fire, or else the first thing that drives them back into the suburbs is the need to buy matches.
Risa’s primary skill isn’t music, it’s medicine, she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up, so she has a good head start here. I will tolerate the cliche of women being the healers if it’s handled as something important rather than just general nurturing stuff. She successfully treats Connor’s bite and tries to apply what she knows of nutrition to the problem of surviving on their foraged berries and random cans diet.
Risa keeps her scamming skills and it’ll be because the state kids are sent off to do certain mandatory fundraisers and Risa liked to volunteer for extra ones just for the chance to get out for a little while.
We can actually keep storking. It isn’t too hard.
Instead of it being some special law because the author is too stupid to know about safe haven laws, it’s driven by a more reasonable calculation.
If you give up a baby to the state, it’ll just be killed for budget reasons once it hits its teens. That’s what happens to most of them. Therefore, the mothers who would normally be giving it up in a hospital often choose to take it and abandon it on someone’s doorstep instead, in the hopes that faced with a baby, they won’t just bring it back to a hospital to dump it. This doesn’t really work very often, which is what prompts Connor to grab the kid. His backstory trauma then is just that the baby shows up and his parents send it in to the state home. Then the potential for actual debate – is it better to take the kid and try to protect it, even though they have no resources to do so, or leave it when it’ll almost certainly be unwound when it gets to be their age?
The school is then a nice side trip, letting us get a better look at things. Connor and Lev can go hang out in the bathroom, while Risa goes to the nurse to use those people skills of hers and try to talk the nurse out of some supplies and maybe get a quick rundown of the basics of childcare.
Then Lev betrays them, only to contact the pastor and hear that no, they wanted him to stay lost. Don’t make it about the pastor guy being the one good person, have him say how he and Lev’s parents had thought this was right before they’d seen Lev grow up. Probably would help to make Lev an only child instead.
He pulls the fire alarm and they all manage to get out in the chaos. Afterward, neither of the other kids know what to do with him – he betrayed them, but he also saved them, and they realize they can’t afford to split up because they don’t know what they’ll be facing.
Then they keep bouncing along, doing all the stuff Lev did on his cross country trip. The baby makes it all harder, of course – everyone notices a baby. So they often have to split up and bring stuff back for whoever is caring for it, and of course, all their spare resources have to go for food and supplies for it.
That sacrifice part is important.
Eventually, one of the people Risa’s trying to scam turns out to be a sympathizer and they get into the safehouses from there. There isn’t any reward for turning the kids in, so although some people before then likely suspected, they didn’t bother calling in.
They end up at the scrapyard, and like with the ACTUALLY SURVIVING IN THE WOODS thing, the place gets more than a side mention it’s hellish. There is no recreation area with arcade games, no great library. The kids have to work hard at stuff they don’t know how to do properly, and they do it because they know it’s the only way the place stays afloat. There are some eighteen year olds, but they’re shuffled out as quickly as possible simply because they can’t afford to keep them – ideally, the eighteen+ crowd will keep ties with the group, sending back money, but if not, at least they won’t be costing anything. When they need to deal with outsiders, they sometimes use those eighteen+ kids
Which is not why they end up with a sixteen year old helicopter pilot. That’s just because the guy in charge was the one in charge of flying it. So when he has a heart attack, there’s no one else to fly it. They manage to get to a hospital, and are quickly arrested and sent off to camp.
Lev’s turn to be important. He goes and turns himself in, getting sent to the same place as they were. Then he blows the place and possibly himself up using the loophole that tithes aren’t tested upon admission the way regular kids are, letting him smuggle the explosives in.
So, the repeated theme of the book is about disproving the idea these kids are worthless. Connor doesn’t kidnap Lev because carrying a human shield is somehow worth not being able to run, he acts because he recognizes the tithing clothing. The group then cares for the baby at great cost to themselves. The scrapyard runs because the kids work together, including to support the less useful members among their group and to help finance rescuing more kids, and as adults, continue to aid the group when they can. Risa and the helicopter pilot, possibly Connor if conservation of characters demands it, risk their own lives to save an adult, and then Lev blows up the camp to save them.
Depending on how cynical things get, this then either has them still on the run, or has the explosive end finally bring this to media attention. Risa tells the story of everything that’s happened, people collectively stop thinking it’s okay to murder teens. Or if Lev doesn’t blow himself up, maybe Risa and Connor die while helping the other kids at the murder camp escape after he blows up some other stuff.
(You can also remove Connor entirely from the story. He’s only needed for the initial accident, so if you just say the bus crashed on its own, then Risa can kidnap Lev as she’s running by stopped cars, and she’s also the one who grabs the baby since she sees it as going to just grow up and be killed like her. Or he can appear initially, but split up from the others early. He’s really irrelevant for the rest of the story.)
In conclusion:
I’ve been seeing a lot of google searches showing up on my stats where it’s phrased as some reading question, so apparently a lot of kids are getting this as a school book. That’s horrible. The one example I tracked back rather tips its hand when it gets to In Unwind, the Second Civil War was fought between pro-life and pro-choice forces. Where does your group stand on the issue of abortion? What is the reasoning behind your opinion(s)? Reread the first page of the book, entitled “The Bill of Life”. Look up the fourteenth amendment to our constitution. This amendment has been used as the basis for pro-abortion “forces” in our country. How is it used to support their claim? so I’m going to just assume it’s all horrible. If you’re reading this, homework googlers, tell your parents your teacher and/or school system is terrible for making you read this book and that they should complain as loudly as possible to everyone they can. Also, for other books you should actually read them and not just google plot points.
Anyway. We’re done with that for now.
As you may have noticed, the Saturday poll has been quite horribly broken, so I’m not going to bother putting up the next book poll for a bit. Let’s wait and see if the votes disappear again first. We have lots of The Host to get through, and before we even get to that I’m going to spend the rest of this month on individual reviews.
Good fucking riddance.
“I’m going to spend the rest of this month on individual reviews.”
No extra carapaces? :(
See, one of those things is a thing that’s already done (and outsourceable!), and the other is a thing I need to do. I’ll try to use the free time to chip away at the reviewing for Sundays, though.
It just struck me how dodgy it is to have a book ostensibly about abortion-related issues to still have most characters be male.
Well, Shusterman obviously thinks that women shouldn`t worry their pretty little heads, and that white, christian males will stop all that murdering babies nonsense. Otherwise he woudn`t have written about how abortion affects his self insert.
Ah, but it’s not about abortion-related issues at all. It’s about how because of abortion, lots of other stuff happens that affects real people. When you want to focus on everything but the actual thing impacting women, it just makes sense to remove them so they can’t confuse your narrative about how everything else is their fault.
It occurs to me that the author would have better accomplished his purpose if he had made his pro-life strawmen as ridiculous as his pro-choice strawmen. For example, what if the pro-choice side of the bargain was child murder, and the pro-life side of the bargain was a nationwide ban on abortion (even to save the mother’s life), contraception, and non-procreative sex, with enough government monitoring equipment to enforce it? Throw in nationwide legalization of marital rape, women becoming legally defined as the property of their fathers or husbands depending on life stage, and extreme stigmatization of being a rape victim (and, of course, still no abortions for them), and we’d have a properly neutral dystopia going on. We could also have a neat little religious conflict between fundamentalist Christians who think the *worst* children should be unwound and fundamentalist Christians who think the *best* children should be unwound.
CONCEPT: Part of the right’s side of the bargain is that unwind’s genitals all must be discarded, because we wouldn’t want anybody exploiting this new child-disciplining method to get sex changes; that would be disgusting.
“his purpose”
I think you are vastly misunderstanding that.
For example, what if the pro-choice side of the bargain was child
murder, and the pro-life side of the bargain was a nationwide ban on
abortion (even to save the mother’s life), contraception, and
non-procreative sex
So aside from what Ember just said, this is still the problem in which one thing is a lie said to discredit that side, and the other is a thing actual people actually want. There have been actual bans on all three of those things, they still are banned in some places, and many states in America are currently pushing to get those things. There has been no one pushing to murder teenagers, ever.
Damnit, why does every strawman position I come up with have to already be taken by someone in real life?
Forced impregnation of all women. There. Nobody’s argued for that (at least in the same sense that nobody’s argued for a parent’s right to murder teenagers);
Hm. Forced impregnation + carving many of the resulting kids up for parts seems an okay mutually unsatisfactory strawman. It’s still got the issue of suffering falling disproportionately on women, but it’s generally fucked up enough to distract from any close analysis.
But by that point the setting is so bizarre it’s impossible to have much connection to the real world.
I can already only process the setting if I disconnect it entirely from the real world, so I don’t view that as a step backwards at all.
What shouldn’t be lost in all the plotting clusterfuck is that Shusterman is a terrible writer and the book a technical disaster. Even if he neutralized the setting, I don’t think he could pull it off. It’s still be The Adventures of Connor-Sue and his Sycophant Girlfriend. “Nice socks!”(TM)
Farla, I’d love to have your toughts on this. http://io9.com/what-happens-to-love-when-cryogenics-and-dating-service-480047009
I have begun a drinking game, because that is apparently the only thing I’m good at, in which I am reading the sequel and triquel (you can see I’ve been playing recently since I’m going to continue pretending triquel is a thing. Sequception?) and every time Connor is a martyr or a female is helpless and worthless and every time the author pretends there’s any grey moral ground I take a drink. I am probably going to die of liver failure.
I hope you’re doing it with water. You’ll still probably die from water intoxication but you’ll last longer!
Oh, and every time logic and science is laughed at and spat on (muscle memory, muscle memory, muscle memory)
Just looked at organdonor.gov. Someone who knows the nuts and bolts better than I do could probably do this better, but here goes. For 2013, about 28,000 people got transplants, and about 100,000 needed them. That works out to 0.04% of the 300 million population of the USA. And this is the people who need a transplant. So there’s absolutely no way “unwinding” could possibly become the society-dominating institution it’s portrayed as, complete with (for instance) its own dedicated police force that are all over the place. Even if you quadruple the numbers (to 0.16% of the population), the society portrayed would have warehouse after warehouse stuffed full of organs that would never be used. The only way around it is if a huge portion of the population is willing to undergo the time, expense, danger, and rehabilitation of multiple transplants just for the hell of it.
In fairness, they do say that they deal with a lot of stuff with transplants that previously we used regular medicine to deal with. In fairness in the other direction, yeah, you’d still have vats upon vats of unused organs. (Especially with cigarettes banned – people should be smoking up a storm now. Throat cancer? Eh, throat was getting old anyway, time for a new one!)
Sorry I’m joining this discussion so late, I’m just going through your blog now and checking out all the older entries.
I remember liking Unwind a lot, until I also remembered that I skipped half the book because the only character i really cared about was Lev.
i never even picked up on that nasty anti-choice implication–i was far more interested in the youth rights angle. This really didn’t seem very far-fetched to me. ok the science did, and the reasons for the heartland war, and…a lot of things, but not the act of parents turning on their children like this. In part because of the troubled teen industry. That’s a thing where parents send their troublesome kids away to super suspect schools and camps and basically the kids get abused into behaving better. So to me (especially as a teenager), reading about kids whose parents send them away to get dismembered wasn’t really out of the question.
However, the anti-choice message is creepy (somehow i like…blocked that part of the book out of memory? weird), and I never liked connor. And yeah, there’s something gross about a book about bodily autonomy where the majority of characters are cis dudes. and it also doesn’t seem to delve into the implications of women being forced to carry children if abortions are illegal? like, there’s never a mention of high rates of death by childbirth, or poverty being skewed towards single women even more than it already is.
i guess it’s one of those series i read when i was younger and i didn’t pick up on the nasty implications of it.
In part because of the troubled teen industry. That’s a thing where parents send their troublesome kids away to super suspect schools and camps and basically the kids get abused into behaving better.
Oh, those things are horrifying.
I guess the problem is this doesn’t really push that angle, which is all about control. There are parents that will abandon or kick out their kids to live on the streets, and there are parents that send them offshore to be beaten into compliance, but the ones who want an obedient kid back don’t seem like they’d be interested in selling their kid, and the ones who kick their kids out would probably still mostly stop short of literally killing their kid.
Maybe if there was more focus on this being about control and money. Kids being killed for being gay, families having kids solely to sell them later, etc. Or a direct comparison by the unwind kids to how really rich parents send their kids to other places to be abused into obedience (with maybe some brain bits cut out and replaced with brain spackle until the kid acts the way they want).
This is a world that I think would work at least a bit better if they didn’t have it that all (or at least 99.44%) of an unwound child must be used.
Instead of the idea that the unwound continue to live in a divided state, the party line could be that they are saving lives, with the implication that those saved are more worthy of life than a troublesome teenager. Ditch the bit about Emby’s parents only being able to get him one asthmatic lung because that was all they could afford. Having transplant organs available as needed, no charge, gives a motive for the wider population to support unwinding. If Emby got stuck with asthmatic lungs, it was luck of the draw, as all of Harlan’s vital organs had to be used, and his parents couldn’t afford the bribe needed for him to be “randomly assigned” the top quality parts. The official requirement could be that all vital organs be transplanted, with limbs, skin, hair, brain bits, etc. sometimes taken if there is a need for them at the time of unwinding but it’s not compulsory. Blood is harvested but if it’s not used, it’s not a problem. Maybe they don’t bother to routinely harvest or store bone marrow so, if there isn’t a match among the kids awaiting unwinding at the time you need it, you’re out of luck.
More could be done to build the world and to show the knock-on effect of the ban on abortion (and birth control?) on their society. For one thing, there are going to be a lot more children to be provided for. We know that the state homes operate on a shoestring budget and I’d say that it’s a safe bet that there is less support available to families as far as things like tax credits are concerned. Even free public school education may be a thing of the past, with parents expected to pay at least part of the cost. Alternatively, instead of tax credits to contribute towards the cost of raising a child, there may be increased taxes to be paid in respect of each child in a family. What employer will offer paid maternity and paternity leave if they run the risk of getting calls in the morning from newly storked employees who won’t be back for months? Same goes for covering health insurance for dependents.
If it is much more expensive to raise a child in this world, and you have no choice but to support doorstep babies to age 13, families could get desperate and stressed and it could lead to some kids being unwound. Some wealthy families facing the prospect of inheritances being divided among more and more kids each generation could have begun to hide behind the idea of tithing, accepting praise for “generously” giving a child to God, rather than admit that they’re unwinding their kids for financial reasons or taking precautions against being storked and admitting that they can’t afford the extras.
Instead of being tithed because he is the tenth child, Lev might have been the third or fourth child in his family to be tithed. Rather than the spiel about Lev being the best and the brightest of his siblings, the decision about which kids to tithe may be based on their potential, with parents raising the ones they consider to have the most potential to adulthood but getting rid of the ones they see as less likely to succeed.
Throw in a law requiring parents to treat all of their children, at least the ones they keep, equally (a law intended to protect storked kids) and there is an added motive to reduce numbers. Not only must inheritance be equal, you can’t put one through college/private school unless you’re putting them all through college/private school. It’s another reason for the wealthy to tithe at thirteen, before the kid is old enough to be sent to a private high school.
With larger, more expensive families, working and middle class people have less opportunity to save for retirement so some could focus family resources on the ones they think are most likely to be able and willing to support them in their old age. Maybe Connor’s little brother is very intelligent and hard-working but his parents couldn’t send him to college without also sending delinquent slacker Connor, and they couldn’t afford to send both boys.
Instead of the idea that the unwound continue to live in a divided state, the party line could be that they are saving lives, with the implication that those saved are more worthy of life than a troublesome teenager.
You know, I think the problem there is it’s too close to what the actual pro-life side wants these days, while the blithering about them not really being dead lets it connect more to the pro-choice argument that abortion is actually different than murder. The number of women who die because someone wouldn’t let them get an abortion makes it clear that the pro-life side values an unborn baby over the woman they’re in. Maybe decades back when the pro-life lobby was mostly Catholic and about God loving babies, you could do a horror flip where the babies are murdered for the adults instead of the adults murdered for the babies like God wants, but the current political system has the same groups that hate abortion refusing babies life-saving health care the moment they actually come out, so children dying for the convenience of adults is already fine.
Rather than the spiel about Lev being the best and the brightest of his siblings, the decision about which kids to tithe may be based on their potential, with parents raising the ones they consider to have the most potential to adulthood but getting rid of the ones they see as less likely to succeed.
I think the tithing being a birth thing makes a degree of sense if you assume that unwinding less impressive kids is already standard. If you want to present yourself as wealthy, you don’t want to admit you can only afford to put so many kids through college just like one of those lower-class buffoons. And if you have the money to set a kid up properly, it doesn’t matter if they’re the best and brightest – besides, you can always buy IQ spackle if you really need it. Instead you just declare every surprise pregnancy and surprise doorstep baby a tithe and insist it’s a sacrifice you’re making because you’re so rich you can afford to throw some extra the church’s way instead of because you can’t afford twenty prep schools.
Not only must inheritance be equal, you can’t put one through college/private school unless you’re putting them all through college/private school. It’s another reason for the wealthy to tithe at thirteen, before the kid is old enough to be sent to a private high school.
Hm. I don’t think you could enforce full equality – if only one kid qualifies for the private school, what next? But it might be interesting to have a setup where since all the funds have to be distributed equally, if kid A gets a private education, kid B gets the same amount into his bank account to recieve upon adulthood. A gets college, B gets the same in cash. It seems really obvious that you just unwind B and drain the accounts again at this point, which would encourage unwinding but seems too blatant and unfair. Conversely, it could be you can’t unwind a kid who still has a balance of owed educational activity, which would serve to improve the quality of the final product. And if the government pays out to the parents when they unwind a kid, then you could get weird situations where the apparent favorite is actually just a living tax shelter while their uneducated sibling is the one who’s going to live to adulthood. (There’s also the possibility of stacking the deck where you give one kid a lot of early support and hope they can coast along on scholarships while you delay spending further until you can unwind their sibling, then return to putting resources into your now only child.)