Undivided by Neal Shusterman And this is why young adult is the most subversive book genre.  Like th

Undivided by Neal Shusterman And this is why young adult is the most subversive book genre.  Like the first three books, I finished book four in about 72 hours. How did I get my hands on it prior to release, you might ask. I accidentally fell upon it in a bookstore. In the stacks. By accident. I’m convinced it was fate.  Undivided is a brilliant and satisfying culmination of the struggles of Connor, Risa, Lev and Cam, full of four-books’ worth of threads woven intricately together. I will not divulge any spoilers here, but I will say that the book managed to make me swallow the bile rising in my throat on more than one occasion. Mary Shelley would be proud. I was alternately horrified for, cheering on, panicking with and surprised by our sundry heroes. (And when this book is inevitably made into a film, quite frankly, I don't think I’ll be able to stomach watching it.) And I’ll say it again. Why isn’t this series trumping Hunger Games and Divergent? - Or is it and I’m just out of the loop? Actually, it’s the most plausible dystopian scenario of the three. Which is possibly why we’d like to keep it safely buried just out of sight. When it comes down to it, I can’t help but think that the entire Unwind series is about failure. Our failure to our youth. And maybe we aren’t unwinding them just yet, but we are cutting school funding, and in my home city, closing schools by the dozens. We do shut down their libraries and rec centers so much so that flash mobs - and I don’t mean the dancing kind - broke out in Philly in the multitudes.  We are medicating them with everything from anti-depressants to stimulants to good old-fashioned sugar and TV. Sometimes I look at our education system in America like some characters look at unwinding, and think, What have we done?  But in the real world we’ve not only abandoned our role as steward to the younger generation, we’ve greedily taken on the role of playing God. (Isn’t it amazing how far Mary Shelley was ahead of her time?) Don’t science and technology now fly at the speed of light? And I wonder if we ever ask, should we before we ask how can we…? And beyond that, how parsed are we these days? How willing are we to sell our parts to the highest bidder? How much do we blindly subscribe to the agendas of the conglomerates? As I asked my friend on 14th st. the other day, where is our moral compass?  So while the whole ‘dismemberment of teenagers for corporate gain’ thing is pretty terrifying, what’s far more terrifying is that this series is frighteningly plausible in our socio-economic-politically-corrupt-media-driven-shame-inducing-fear-mongering climate. And that, my friend, is a whole other matter.  -- source link

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