hystericalcheezit

Okay, so at first when I started this I was a bit worried it wouldn't be as good for me as the previous book was, considering I couldn't exactly remember the characters all that well - but not to worry, it was damn good, even with the lapse in memories on my part. Considering it's been, like, six fucking years, I remembered a surprising amount, and the little hints and reminders sprinkled throughout the book helped quite a bit. 

Anyway, it was really good. Like really good, especially the last hundred pages. They fucking did it for me. In fact they were so good, I almost wanna give this book five stars, but considering it consistently breaks up the people I want to work together, it can suck my dick. Though reuniting the "martyr and the patron saint" perhaps balances that out.

The characters in this book - never mind the plot itself, and the expert world-building and intricacies in the past and life and the background people and everything- are so well-written and developed and change and grow and maybe sometimes don't grow and are bad, but - there's a real variety of characters, and it's just refreshing and nice and wonderful and I love it.

Unwind was incredibly important to me, though, and therefore this book is as well. I mean, it wasn't just the characters and their relationships with each other and the events they had to go through, or the premise for the story - unwinding people, replacing teeth. It was everything put together and how...what if I lived in a world like this? Would I be one of the kids getting unwound, or would I be one of the people getting parts to replace the teeth I had so foolishly allowed to break? It filled my mind a lot of the time, it's one of those books that sticks with you, that you don't think about just occasionally, but think about constantly, and is somehow always relevant in your life.

This book is important for me, to me. For the world, really. Because I mean as far-fetched as it seems, anything's possible. Can you imagine the world allowing teenagers to be unwound? We'd need the technology first, of course, but are we really that far away from being able to do such a thing? It's scary. And it's neat, of course. Terrifyingly intriguing. So that alone makes this book wonderful, but the way Shusterman goes about it makes it even more so, with the characters and the third-person present tense, everything just goes so well together, works so well. Makes this into a story that is memorable, remarkable, and not just because of the world created in it but because of the way it is done about, and because of the characters and the way their lives are so creatively intertwined. 

So yeah, I love this book. I always will. I can't wait for the next book, thank God I won't have to wait another six fucking years.

on goodreads