As a general rule, I don't tend to get involved in series before they are finished. It doesn't matter if it's books or television media I just seem to have boundless patience for deferring even starting a series. Of course, once I have started a series I had finishing the first installment and then waiting for then next to come out. I guess I'm impatient by nature and I hate waiting for the next book, next episode, next season, or whatever.
Occasionally though, I find myself starting a series without realizing it. A good first book in a series can feel like an excellent standalone novel. That's what happened to me with the Arc of the Scythe series. I read Scythe and fell in love. It was the first Shusterman novel I'd read, so I perpetuated my usual pattern and hit the used bookstores to gather up all the Shusterman books I could find. I gathered up close to 20 books on that first run and discovered that there was a sequel to Scythe called Thunderhead. Oh gawd.
I bought it, of course. I bought it new because it was all of about a month old. I read it and then I waited for over a year for the last book in the series, Toll, to come out. It was excruciating. And because I started about four of my students on the series, they were breathlessly waiting too. It was hard. There was deep psychological trauma. But really, I've spent some time thinking about my book buying patterns and how they don't really help support the writers that I love, at least not directly. It's something to think on.
I thought I was done with the series after Toll. However, I was walking through the school library and I spotted a new volume, Gleanings. Technically it's not a new novel, it's a collection of short stories and novellas set in the Arc of the Scythe world. It actually seems to be a new trend for authors of successful YA series to do this and I haven't decided yet what I think of it.
In this case though, I really liked it. All the stories were excellent and it really made me want to reread the series. It has been long enough since I read the trilogy that I had to really dig to remember some of the references.
All the stories were, as I already said, excellent, but I particularly enjoyed four of them: "Never Work with Animals", "The Mortal Canvas", "The Persistence of Memory", and "A Dark Curtain Rises." Each of these stories explores aspects of the world that may or may not be directly related to the events of the main series. "A Dark Curtain Rises," for example, occurs well after the trilogy closes and revived one of my favorite characters.
One of the main themes running through the trilogy has to do with corruption. Shusterman seems to have really spent some time exploring the adage that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." He does a great job of introducing it into series and hinting that the excesses of some of the scythes were common place without really enumerating them. "Never Work with Animals," followed one of these corrupt scythes and resolved in a very amusing manner.
"The Persistence of Memory" has some similar qualities but involves a strange sort of competition between two scythes with very different interpretations of their job. (Their job being the only source of death in a deathless society.) This conflict comes to a head when the niece of one scythe is marked for gleaning by the other.
Of the four "The Mortal Canvas" was probably my favorite. This one takes place before way before the events of the trilogy and it involves an art teacher and her class. The art teacher is old enough that she was born before human life could be infinitely extended. Her art class is visited by a scythe who proposes an art contest between the students. There was something incredible about this one. Somehow, Shusterman managed to encapsulate something about how our mortality defines us.
All in all, a great read. I think I will have to find time to reread the whole series
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