Wednesday, January 17, 2018

On the Nook: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Here's an overview of the story from Barnes & Noble:


In America after the Second Civil War, the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life armies came to an agreement: The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, a parent may choose to retroactively get rid of a child through a process called "unwinding." Unwinding ensures that the child's life doesn’t “technically” end by transplanting all the organs in the child's body to various recipients. Now a common and accepted practice in society, troublesome or unwanted teens are able to easily be unwound.
With breath-taking suspense, this book follows three teens who all become runaway Unwinds: Connor, a rebel whose parents have ordered his unwinding; Risa, a ward of the state who is to be unwound due to cost-cutting; and Lev, his parents' tenth child whose unwinding has been planned since birth as a religious tithing. As their paths intersect and lives hang in the balance, Shusterman examines serious moral issues in a way that will keep readers turning the pages to see if Connor, Risa, and Lev avoid meeting their untimely ends.

Neal Shusterman visited our school several years ago and talked about how he came up with the idea to write Unwind.  He quoted a political poll where they were asking people what issues were important enough to them that they'd switch their vote to a different candidate - even if it was a candidate from another political party - if their candidate's views differed from their own.  People were willing to compromise on just about every issue except for abortion.  He figured that if we were every to have another civil war in this country, it would probably be over this issue.

I've read this book several times and always enjoyed it.  I've always found the central premise of the story, however, to be unbelievable: it's too much of a stretch to think that this "compromise" where children from 13-18 could be unwound (not technically killed, but still, you know, killed) would be acceptable to either side.

On my last reading, however, I started to think about how many people - including many people known personally to me who are reasonable, kind people - are vehemently opposed to abortion but just as strongly supportive of the death penalty.  The best defense I have heard (though I don't find it ultimately persuasive) goes something like this: the death penalty is a just and proportional penalty for very serious crimes.  Taking someone's life is so great an offense that no penalty could justly be imposed short of losing one's own life.  Conversely, an unborn fetus cannot possibly make any choices so horrible as to ever justify demanding its life.  Proponents would argue that their support of the death penalty actually reflects how highly they value life - particularly the life of the person killed or destroyed by the perpetrator - that they would consider such punishment to be merited.

Like I said, I don't find that argument persuasive myself, but I can see a lot of people in our country agreeing with it.

So, the idea of people believing that someone between 13 and 18 having been around long enough for their choices and behavior to justify a parent's decision to have them unwound might not be as crazy as I initially thought.  I mean, we consider someone who is 18 to be an adult, and we often hear of people younger than that being "tried as an adult" with the argument that they are old enough to know that what they did was wrong and that they should be held accountable.

Once we've accepted the general premise, the rest is just haggling over details.  So, yeah, this story is actually scarier than I initially thought it was, and for that reason, perhaps more important to read than I initially thought, as well.

And it's really well written!

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