Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who link up.
Finished! - From my #MustRead list: Scythe - Neal Shusterman
Two memorable characters, others as well, plus those despicable ones that make one nervous, hurrying past their scenes in order to calm down. This is a tough one to share without giving away the many surprises. It's a feat of world-building that hopefully will never happen, yet some of it, in the most gruesome of ways, has already happened, like the wars and murders of those "others" in countries where they are not wanted. This new world, in our world's future, takes science to a different level, for even when one ends up "deadish", off to the recovery center they go to be healed. Small wounds are healed by what are called "nanites". We now live in "the age of mortality" but population growth and extreme science cause over-population, thus a world that needs "scythes", those ordained to kill, to "glean" with compassion. It is a world of immortality.If you like science-fiction that takes what is "now" and gives it a nudge into future history, this is the first of the series. There is still good in this world, as we say about today, too. But there is also bad. "Nature deemed that to be born was an automatic sentence to death, and then brought about that death with vicious consistency."
Somehow when this book came out, I didn't read it, so months passed and it became one of those books I knew about but not one I needed to read, until last week. I took my 3rd-grade granddaughter to our favorite Indie store and she chose this one, plus the second one, too. Last week, she brought it to me saying, "You have to read this, Grandma, it's great." And so I did, and I loved it, too. Rozzum, or Roz, a female robot ends up a survivor from a shipwreck that dumped hundreds of crates of other robots in the ocean, but she washed ashore, and when curious sea otters pushing her "on" button, she came alive and decided she wanted to stay that way. Through years of work, which you can read about here, Peter Brown wrote an amazing tale of a robot that became beloved by the animals on a small island, when at first they were alarmed by a "monster". It's a different kind of survival story, but one that shows how much caring for others makes a difference in the way others think of you. There are moments of celebration, of sadness, but most of all, many moments filled with love. I can't wait for my granddaughter to finish The Wild Robot Escapes!
