Unwind [With Earbuds] (Playaway Children) [Preloaded Digital Audio Player]

Set in a not too distant future where unwanted children may be unwound; live in an altered state where 97% of them have been used as donor organs. No one searches for cures anymore, if a body part stops working and you can afford it, you just buy another one. This story is about three young people, who for different reasons are about to be unwound and how fate brings them together.
This story is brilliantly original and well written. Far more chilling than many other books set in the future and an absolute gem of a book.

Have already recommended it to everyone I know. READ IT.
It's also available as an ebook, but not at amazon!

(Source: I borrowed a copy of this book.)
16-year-old Connor is destined to be unwound. What's that? Well following a pro-life/pro-choice war, the government passed a new law - abortions are illegal, children are protected `til age 13, but between the ages of 13 and 18 a child can be `unwound' - taken to pieces and re-used in other people. This means that no child actually dies - their constituent parts live on. Yeah right! Tell that to the poor kids being unwound!

Connor messed up a bit when he was younger, Risa was a ward of the state - and there were budget cuts, and Lev was a tithe (his parents were unwinding him as a way to give back to god/ humanity!).
Irrespective of their reasons for being unwound, all three find themselves on the run, and thrown together through circumstance. Finding themselves in unusual circumstances and strange places along the way, they grow in ways they never would have otherwise, and question what being alive or having a soul is really about. But when it comes to the chop, which is worse; to die, or to be unwound?

Wow! That is one of the first things that comes to mind with this book. I absolutely could not put it down, and when I did put it down I couldn't stop thinking about it!

The book has an eerie dystopian setting, which is unsettling in the way that the reasons for the changes in society are ultimately understandable! Which is very scary! The idea of unwinding is sickening, whilst at the same time makes a disgusting sort of sense. Why abort a child that you can allow to grow up, and then harvest for parts? Parts that are desperately needed! And what an interesting argument - if all the parts live on, then has the child really died?

There are loads of questions like this posed in the book; with tricky subjects such as life and death, the human soul, and religion all touched upon. It is truly an emotional experience to get an insight into each childs life and viewpoint, and to see how they view the idea of their own unwinding, and ultimately their own death. It is also interesting to see how much each child is willing to fight to preserve their life, and really does make for an absorbing read.

I have to say that at times I did feel physically sick though - especially the chapter where we follow a child through the operation to be unwound (the child is conscious throughout), especially given the fact that we are told that this child is taken to pieces and ultimately redistributed in just 3 hours 19 minutes. How wrong that an entire life can be disassembled into constituent parts and ultimately ended, in such a clinical fashion, in a little over three hours.

Overall, I enjoyed this book, and the ideas that it provoked, (even the sickening ones) and I think anyone with an interest in young-adult, dystopian stories will really enjoy this.
9 out of 10.

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 that 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.

Reviewed by: The Compulsive Reader