The border between youth and adult literature sometimes marks a blurred border. Because it is not the same to read novels by JK Rowling and his Harry Potter that one Suzanne Collins or own Neal shusterman, much more advanced towards those thresholds in which the fantastic is the same for a teenager than for a geek in their forties. Perhaps that is the question, that the new forties of our days can really be poorly healed adolescents 😛
Be that as it may, the Shusterman thing is the example of the best-seller that reaches everything from that fantastic that flows to two sides, with that epic point that cajoles pubescent and with a deeper background that also wins more mature readers. Exciting readings
Of course, the extended literary career of good old Neal has given a lot, various series of novels, non-fiction books, short stories and even games with that point of clue games between role-playing, the scape room and the book series « choose your own adventure ”that proliferated in the eighties or nineties.
Here we are going to stop at what has been arriving in Spain from this bestseller where there are those who in its continuous maintenance at the top seem blurred in the face of more sparkling phenomena.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Neal Shusterman
Reaping (scythe bow 1)
The metaphor of the harvest as the most sinister comparison with the end, with the scythe tasked with reaping lives for the harvest of eternity, whether it touches heaven or hell in a faith screening.
From ancient Egypt, Classical Antiquity and until today, death has been approached from the popular imagination with a point of fantasy. The elements, the Olympus or religion develop in human review that inaccessible imaginary that may well be or may have absolutely nothing to do with it. Shusterman invites us to a very particular, attractive, fascinating review of his, a utopia about life and death that ends up being dystopian per se.
Before, people died of natural causes. There were invisible killers called diseases, aging was irreversible and accidents occurred that could not be returned. Now, all that is behind us and only one very simple truth remains: people have to die.
And that is the task of the reapers. Because in a future where humanity controls death, who decides when and how to sow it? Citra and Rowan have just been selected as apprentice reapers. Its objective? Pass your mentor's tests, whatever they may be. Although in the process they renounce everything that makes them human.
Disconnection
Many years ago, back in the prolific eighties, I remember seeing a movie in which a family was preparing to say goodbye to a child. In the general examination from the citizenship he had excelled in his IQ and his parents had to let him go to his destination. A destiny that appeared as something dark and very uncertain for the long-suffering parents.
This time the same idea came to me when I discovered a general approach of the US government that placed young people in the hands of their parents. If a teenager gets tiresome, there is no better excuse to "push him away" in his own way ...
The Second Civil War of the United States, also known as the "Internal War", was a protracted and bloody conflict that concluded with a chilling resolution: human life will be considered inviolable from the moment of conception until the child reaches the age of thirteen, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents may decide to retroactively "abort" their child… on the condition that the child, from a technical point of view, does not die.
The process by which you kill him while keeping him alive is called "disconnection." Currently, disconnection is a frequent and socially accepted practice.
Thunder (scythe bow 3)
In his probing of death as an argument for the dream and idealized "capacity" of immortality, Shusterman posed an apocalyptic scenario in what should be a new paradise reached by men.
And of course, accessing certain knowledge or exceeding certain limits always has its consequences. This closing of the trilogy manages to leave that aftertaste of the most transcendent fantastic stories although always fully entertained in their frantic action. Everything changed three years ago: it was then that Anastasia and Lucifer disappeared; when the reaper Goddard came to power; when the Nimbus withdrew the word from all mankind, except Grayson Tolliver.
In this shocking denouement of The Scythe Arc, the trilogy that Neal Shusterman began with Reaping, loyalties are put to the test and old friends reappear. But the roar of thunder is always the prelude to the storm, and the noise of change may already have begun to resonate among the bringers of death.
