(spoilers for Scythe and Thunderhead.)
In this pulse-pounding conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy, constitutions are tested and old friends are brought back from the dead.
My rating: 1 star.
(spoilers for The Toll.)
Content warnings: PG-13. Mild cursing, one random f-word, characters couple, nudity in a questionable situation, mass murders, a character is about to be burned alive, someone gets a hole ripped through their body, low blood/high body count, non binary character used just for the points, a religion could be a parallel for Christianity and is used as an object of ridicule, an AI program gets creepy, someone is "possessed" by the program without their consent.
Thoughts: It's painfully obvious the author had no idea what he was doing with this book. There are so many things wrong I'm not even going to get into all the problems with this book, but oh where to begin.
The timeline. What the heck was up with that? Shusterman said it was because there was too much to cover, if he hadn't been at different points in the timeline then Rowan and Citra wouldn't have been revived until 400 pages in, blah, blah, blah. I don't even remember what was important about the jumpy timeline. You could easily have had five ish chapters of Greyson becoming the Toll, and maybe Faraday doing... whatever it was he was doing. And then get to the revival point. The whole senseless timeline was completely pointless and took me forever to get through.
It really bothered me how the Tonists were portrayed. I had noticed a few issues in the prior books, but in this one it went way overboard. I see what he was trying to do, and I don't appreciate it in the slightest.
Thunderhead. I really loved the benevolent AI that Scythe created. You don't ever seem to see that. And it didn't go haywire. So instead of going crazy and trying to take over the world, Thunderhead did the exact opposite. And let the world kill itself because it "couldn't break its own laws" or whatever. Which was really just a cop out to... let the world burn, I guess?
And what happened to Thunderhead anyway? I cannot understand its reasoning at all for cutting itself off from the entire world except Greyson, and to keep it up for that long makes absolutely no sense. Plus, why Greyson? What made him special? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
And then it got creepy. Maybe I see child predators a little too easily (see Digory's uncle in The Magician's Nephew) but the way Thunderhead was described as watching Greyson, and the way it kinda tried to interact with him made me super uncomfortable. And it would have been entirely possible to write the same scenes without that creeping perverted feeling. But the author didn't go for that, and the way it was written gave me heavy molester vibes, even though there's nothing physically the Thunderhead could have done. It's still never an idea you want to give an audience about something we're supposedly supposed to like.
There were way too many characters to keep track of. I don't remember probably half of them, and those that I do remember, really didn't have any point. Morrison and Jeri were really only the two new characters that meant anything to the story, and they could have been done way better. Not that any of the characters were really written well.
As a side note on Jeri, I had expected something worse. Yeah, the character wasn't done well, but then no one really was. At least there wasn't a whole sermon every time he opened his mouth. (That's how he seemed written to me, and he doesn't even care about pronouns, so that's what you're getting.) As far as characters on that spectrum go, I've seen a lot worse. I don't think there was a point to it, but it usually didn't needlessly call attention to itself.
On the topic of character portrayal, I really started to notice in this book that Rowan and Greyson are basically the same character, just used differently. It was a little in the back of my mind in Thunderhead, but it was pretty apparent here. Which is annoying and kinda disappointing. One is great, and I do like Rowan, but you don't need two male characters with very similar personalities who are both being used and manipulated by a greater force.
Speaking of Rowan, through this whole series he's given a whole new meaning to the "my favorite character always dies" thing.
Rowan's ending really annoyed me. Leave him the freak alone, Thunderhead, you've already ruined his life enough. Let him be the same age as Citra when they get there.
The entire resolution of the plot was just pathetic. They solved nothing. The main characters literally just ran away from their problems, and we're supposed to be happy about that? Why? After building this entire series up to a major fight with the Goddard hybrid, in the end all they do is run away and let him blow up another island. Sure he dies, but by Rand's hand?? Really? There is no real justice in there, she only did it so she could replace his mind and finally have the boy toy she wanted since recruiting Tyger.
Not happy that she's given an implied happy ending either, but I choose to believe alive Tyger hybrid will realize she's a terrible person and run away from her soon enough.
I am glad that Greyson walked away from Thunderhead. For reasons stated above. It may be the only thing I appreciated about the ending, but at least there was something.
What's even more frustrating is that I got a special edition of this book (because I thought it would hold up) that includes an author commentary section in the back. And he thinks he did fantastically well with the final book. I have no idea how, or how this made it through beta reading without being completely torn apart and rewritten, but here we are. You're not clever, Shusterman. You're an idiot. Not even those red herrings you were so proud of actually fooled anyone.
It was just an entirely unsatisfying ending to a series that started out so strongly. The first two books were fantastic in my opinion, I'm not sure how Shusterman managed to so spectacularly crash and burn, but here we are. I'm just going to pretend this book never existed.
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