Connor, Risa, and Lev are running for their lives.
The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child “unwound,” whereby all of the child’s organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn’t technically end. Connor is too difficult for his parents to control. Risa, a ward of the state is not enough to be kept alive. And Lev is a tithe, a child conceived and raised to be unwound. Together, they may have a chance to escape and to survive.
Ah, it’s nice to be getting back to my roots with a nice, solid Let’s Hate.
I was originally not going to do this, because when I was told the premise of the book I thought it was some fucked up niche thing like Save the Pearls (reminder, if you suffer morbid curiousity, you can and ethically should find that book online for free) but then I discovered the book was conventionally published and had lots of awards. Wikipedia has nothing but accolades:
VOYA also gave a positive review: “The novel follows three protagonists who are attempting to ‘kick-AWOL’ and survive to eighteen to escape their unwindings: Connor, the rebellious teen; Risa, a ward of the state being unwound because of budget cuts; and Lev, a tithe born as an unwind sacrifice. The novel asks two questions: When does a life have value? Who determines whether it is worth keeping? Unfortunately who is unwound and who gets which ‘parts’ is often determined by socio-economic status. In addition, parents seem to shamelessly unwind their children for typical teen frustration and rebellion. Betrayal by parents and the system is a horrifying truth for the protagonists. As such, there are many passages that are difficult to read either for their heartrending nature or their shocking specifics, particularly the detailed ‘harvest’ of a well-known character. Poignant, compelling, and ultimately terrifying, this book will enjoy popularity with a wide range of readers beyond its science-fiction base.”
The School Library Journal gave Unwind a STARRED REVIEW: “…There is evenhanded, thoughtful treatment of many issues, including when life starts and stops, consciousness, religion, free will, law, trust and betrayal, suicide bombers, and hope. Initially, the premise of parents dismantling their children is hard to accept; however, readers are quickly drawn into the story, which is told in a gripping, omniscient voice. Characters live and breathe; they are fully realized and complex, sometimes making wrenchingly difficult decisions. This is a thought-provoking, well-paced read that will appeal widely, especially to readers who enjoy Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2005)…”
TeensReadToo.com also provided a favorable review: “In his chilling new novel, Neal Shusterman paints a picture of a world where there aren’t any cures and doctors, just surgeons and replacements. Three unwanted teenagers face a fate worse than death—unwinding. Their bodies will be cut up, and every part of them used, from their brains to their toes. But if they can stay out of the authorities’ clutches until the age of eighteen, they just might survive…. The most frightening science fiction novels are always the ones that are most similar to our world. Shusterman doesn’t fail to describe how a wrong solution to a modern issue can affect generations to come. Thought-provoking, terrifying, and almost inconceivable, UNWIND will keep you reading late into the night.”
followed by a string of awards it somehow has. Also, its rating on goodreads is 4.23 stars. In comparison, Sabriel has 4.17, so this book is supposedly better than Sabriel. It’s also better than The Hobbit (4.18) but worse than the Hunger Games (4.45).
Well, let’s get this hateshow on the road.
“If more people had been organ donors Unwinding never would have happened.”
—THE ADMIRAL
This, I think, is the book’s attempt to make this not just about abortion. Because clearly, when completely fucking up one major issue, the solution is to add a second issue. (We go into this book to discover how the author has fucked it up. That it has been is a forgone conclusion from the blurb.)
The idea of forced organ donations to get people spare parts is an interesting one that’s been done better many, many times. I read a short story once where criminals are regularly harvested and the ending reveal is that the crime of the protagonist was running three red lights – the moral being, if you create a situation where there’s massive reward for convicting people, laws will quickly get more draconian. I also read a book where they clone people for this and then take their parts.
Anyway, let’s get to the worldbuilding:
The Bill of Life
The Second Civil War, also known as “The Heartland War,” was a long and bloody conflict fought over a single issue.
To end the war, a set of constitutional amendments known as “The Bill of Life” was passed.
It satisfied both the Pro-life and the Pro-choice armies.
The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.
However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively “abort” a child . . .
… on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t “technically” end.
The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called “unwinding.”
Unwinding is now a common, and accepted practice in society.
This makes sense only if you assume the two camps are actually the pro-life and pro-murdering-kids-for-fun.
See, the organ donation thing is completely unrelated to the abortion debate, so there’s no reason it would come up in a compromise. It only works if it’s some sort of bribe offered to the pro-life camp that’s similar to the story I mentioned above where people become fine with the death penalty for running red lights because it gets them a fresh liver, where they’re bribed by the evil pro-choicers and corrupted.
The other problem is that, if you want to bring up additional issues in the abortion debate, the pro-life people are the ones with the history of killing kids – denying food and care to kids whose parents can’t afford it, deaths by exorcisms and other religiously motivated abuses. There are absolutely pro-life people who aren’t horrible monsters, I would even say most of them are decent people, but in comparison there are zero movements on the pro-choice side that advocate abusing children or denying them healthcare or dumping lead on their playgrounds. The closest you get is the occasional vegan starving their kid. The basic idea that children have intrinsic rights…that’s all a progressive thing. The religious right believe children are the property of their parents. The only big groups I know of that are pro-all-life-not-just-babies tend to be Catholic and stuff, and I’m pretty sure “heartland” America would have shot them on sight if they tried to join their army.
Basically…
Things the sort of pro-life people who would join a literal army want:
1) No abortions
2) The right to kill disobedient children
3) The idea people should die if they aren’t successful enough.
…hey look, it’s compromise where one side gets everything they want! I guess that’s what happens when you also make up 95% of the crazed militia in the country. I guess the liberal media came in to spin the pro-choice’s crushing defeat as a “compromise”. Or maybe the compromise was that the organs go to whoever needs them rather than the highest bidder.
Maybe I should write a story where there’s a war between people who think you should only get medical care if you can afford it and people who think everyone should have it, and the “compromise” is that no one gets medical care!
This is already more thought than the author presumably put into it. I’m pretty sure all the reasoning was:
One side wants to murder babies! The other doesn’t! They compromise by murdering thirteen year olds! Cutting commentary!
And you can tell that yes, he thinks pro-choice is let’s-kill-babies because look at that dog whistle there about “retroactive abortion“, which, if you read pro-life stuff, comes up all the time because they think it’s a great comparison, sort of like how if we allow gay marriage people will start fucking children and dogs. The idea of there being armies for either camp is nearly as suspect, that’s how the really militant hard right groups talk.
Now, as you may be gathering from my bitter, bitter hatred here, the proper cutting commentary if I were doing this would have been the fucking pro-lifers winning the war and then instituting this, with some defectors on the pro-choice side getting seduced into agreement for those fresh livers, kind of like libertarians that vote Republican because they don’t give a fuck about gay people and just want lower taxes.
I have heard the defense that really, this story is about organ donation and teen angst, but fuck you, if it was supposed to be about organ donation it wouldn’t have made the centerpiece of the backstory that pro-life and pro-choice “armies” fought a civil war until they compromised over killing thirteen year olds for spare parts. One of these two subjects is an actual issue in this country that hurts a lot of people, and it’s not the organ donation.
It seems to me less a compromise and more “then NO-ONE will watch TV” solution. It leaves everyone equally unsatisfied!
Or, yeah, fundies.
I fear that might be what he’s going for, but the prolife people do get what they want (at the cost of something else bad) meaning the prochoice’s side of the compromise must have been teen murder.
A compromise everyone would hate would be having the government decide who does and doesn’t get abortions, and even that’s worse for the pro-choice people because they’re no happier with forced abortions than they are forced pregnancy. Maybe add in something about mandatory contraceptives too, and have the forced pregnancy/abortions be totally unrelated to social status.
Okay, I’m going to call shenanigans. Aside from the fact that the process is so fantastical,
it also violates some long-established laws and codes of ethics, which
in and of themselves would be pretty much sufficient to ensure nobody
does the research. The premise itself is retarded, from a scientific point of view.
Also, it’s WORSE than abortion, from both pro-life or choice, in every possible way. It eliminates the
health and economic benefits of an abortion by requiring the child be
born and raised. And what about the people who can’t afford to
raise a child in the first place? You know, poor women. Or worse, poor raped women.
The abortion issue is primarily based on
whether or not an embryo is technically alive; here, the argument over
the morality of killing someone who’s potentially alive is somehow resolved by killing someone who’s obviously alive. How did this ever pass as an option?
Also, it’s WORSE than abortion, from both pro-life or choice, in every possible way.
Almost! Remember there are two very different prolife camps. There’s the one that thinks all life is precious and that killing fetuses is like killing any human being. And there’s the one that thinks only rich adult men should have rights. They probably have men’s rights meetings about how unfair it is that you have to get both parents to agree to an unwinding and how you should be able to overrule her and kill your kid for parts whenever you feel like it.
This book would make so much sense as a fucked up hard right theocracy.
Haha, jinx!
@disqus_NouHDmknVK:disqus Yeah, it could work…
@Farla:disqus But it would work better if there were no explanation at all. Just be vague as why it is the current state of things.
Nah, I don’t really think you can have a premise so outlandishly dystopian without some examination of how it came to be. For one thing, the readers won’t be satisfied without *something* by way of explanation. For another, dystopian novels as a genre are inherently political, so as an author you’re just wasting your and everyone else’s time if there’s no meaningful connection to the world as it actually exists.
“Also, it’s WORSE than abortion, from both pro-life or choice, in every possible way.”
Almost, except that many pro-“life” crusaders are actually just pro-adorable innocent babies and manifestly do not care at all whether teenagers die. So like Farla says, it’s not a compromise so much as one side getting something it wants along with other stuff it might or might not be so comfortable with and the other side getting nothing.
I have never, ever encountered those people. Like the OP here, I think the vast majority of people in the pro-life camp are working under the assumption that an unborn child is alive and thus killing it is murder and therefor bad. I have never encountered someone who thought that but then went, “Eh, child abuse is cool though.”
edit: Just to clarify, I’m not trying to be accusatory. I’m just genuinely baffled that people associate being pro-life with being okay with child abuse. It seems just as hyperbolic as saying being pro-choice means you like to kill babies. I have literally never met either of these camps in my life. Do you think of it as a Bible Belt thing or something?
Yeah, the people Farla’s talking about are the weird spare-the-rod cults you find in those areas. I, on the other hand, wasn’t talking about child abuse so much as the super extreme pro-lifers who advocate NO ABORTIONS EVER NO EXCEPTIONS, meaning that they would rather teenage girls die than get abortions even if the baby dies with them, because the sluts need to take responsibility for having had sex (even if they were raped).
Ah, the things you miss growing up in a metropolitan area.
Haha, yeah. Also I’ve seen people in online debates break out statistics that prove abortion rates don’t actually go down that much if it’s illegal, it just leads to more patients dying from unsafe abortions, and people on the other side stating flat-out that they don’t care about the lives of girls who would kill their babies, so they would rather the laws be in place if they bring abortion rates down even a little, because a few innocent babies > any number of sinful sluts.
There’s also being against abortion while in favor of denying health care to sick newborns if the parents can’t foot the bill, and cutting out programs for childcare or prenatal care.
The child abuse issue is understandably hard to believe, but some sects of Christianity have gone into psychotic cult mode.
=_= And that article is a nice example of how to not be Christian. Or a good parent. Or a decent human being.
I think the short story you mentioned may be Larry Niven’s “The Jigsaw Man”. I’m reasonably certain that you’ll be experiencing a fair bit of blind, psychotic rage during this review, so it might be a good thing to look at when you need to unwind. I’m sure that the kittens will appreciate it if you manage to do this before punching them.
I think so! Was that the one where one of the criminals smuggled explosives in his leg so he could suicide without being used for parts?
As one of those seamless-garmet pro-lifers, yeah, this is sickening. Also, who keeps publishing these? Why is childmurder now the hot new trend for YA lit? I was under the impression that escapism was not about literally escaping horrific scenarios.
Also, isn’t this the first male YA writer you’ve covered? I know I’m late to the party, but this already seems to be leading nowhere pleasant.
Well, this actually seems more topical than the other childmurdery stuff, since abortion is so contested right now and organ donation is a bit of a sleeper issue.
A sleeper issue? How so?
Well, there’s the whole opt-in/opt-out thing, where in America we prefer the one with minimum organ donations. And there’s the occasional scare story about doctors letting people, including babies, die so they can get the organs for other people, including babies. Plus there’s the ban on using any dead fetal tissue and I think there’s also a ban on using any dead baby parts if they’re under five days old. And the whole idea that you won’t go to heaven if they’ve cut bits of you out. And the idea that organs will possess you so transplants are just bad.
This seems like a really, really weird premise. “Compromise” as in “everyone loses”? 0_o
I’m definitely pro-life. To me, abortion is denying the right to life to still-forming kids who aren’t out of the womb yet. It isn’t about not caring for rape victims or women who aren’t ready to be moms. I really like the adoption solution for situations like those, though it doesn’t always end happily. And while I don’t like sex before marriage, I’m okay with sex education. People are still going to choose one way or the other, and education is only going to cut down on the number of unwanted kids/pregnancies.
I also get that people who are pro-choice are working with different definitions of when the life starts and other things. Both sides defining the same issue differently leads to the butting of heads.
But…gah. You know, I’m pretty sure neither side advocates killing disobedient kids or treating them like property. You pointed out a lot of great liberal movements to help kids. And pro-lifers are wanting the kids to have basic rights before they pop out.
So this war thing, and the subsequent treaty. Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers alike should be appalled at the murder-harvesting. Why on earth would the pro-life side be satisfied by agreeing kids are safe until and after they’re born, but can be knocked off later for being unwanted? That’s like magnifying the problems both sides have.
It’s… Neither side is running on that kind of stupid for this premise to make sense. Also, the book has already ruined its chances for making a clever argument by smacking the opposing side in the face. … And also people it perceives as being on its side.
Whatever was intended here, it does seem like a better organ-harvesting plot. The background story sounds like it could have been swapped out. We’re all about morally bankrupt governments in our woeful future books, these days. Why not just go that direction?
really like the adoption solution for situations like those, though it doesn’t always end happily.
Yeah, but by “doesn’t always” we’re looking at suicides during the pregnancy and death from complications or permanent health problems followed by more suicides after giving up the baby – suicides you do not see if you allow the women to abort. And that’s assuming they’re not so desperate they risk a horrible death getting an illegal abortion. It’s the fetus or the woman.
And we’re talking here about a country that won’t support the kids it has. There are so many kids right now who go hungry in America, who aren’t getting proper medical care, let alone a decent education that might allow them to have a better life as an adult. There are so many kids are already in the foster system who need parents, so many others the social workers leave with abusive families because it’s better than the alternative, so many existing good families are already stretched to their limits caring for the kids they have. No one needs there to be more unwanted children, least of all the unwanted children.
It would be nice to live in a world where abortion wasn’t necessary. But the rights of a fetus cannot trump the rights of everyone else, and forcing a child to be born into a world that doesn’t want it and won’t care for it isn’t doing it any favors either.