The Unwinding of
the book,
Don’t see it? Search up the cover. It’s right there, under the word “Unwind.” I thought it meant something similar to trilogy or duology, and it was like a series of four books, perhaps.
As it turns out, it’s not even a real word. The author had previously devised it from Latin roots. Many sites have speculated on what it means. You’ll realize very soon that that word is very, very accurate to the series.
Unwind takes place inside a post-civil war America where parents are legally allowed to subject their children to “unwinding,” which is the process of some doctors and surgeons manually taking apart a teenager for their organs, bones, blood, etc. All that is then donated to hospitals, where it’s used to save lives.
Parents subject their children to this for a variety of reasons: Their kid is too unruly, their kid is a drug addict, they just hate their kid, they want to be rid of the kid, you get the idea. It’s a world where every person under the age of eighteen lives in fear of becoming unwilling organ donors.
Our story focuses on three different Unwinds (kids who get subjected to unwinding): Connor, Risa, and Lev. Connor’s parents subject him to unwinding as his grades slip in school and he seems more and more like a failure. Risa is an orphan under governmental protection. Unfortunately for her, 5% of all orphans or kids under their care are subjected to unwinding. And Lev is a tithe, a kid who knew from birth that he would eventually be unwound for religious reasons.
In a freak highway incident, while Connor is being pursued by Juvey-cops, police officers specializing in capturing runaway Unwinds, all three manage to escape the Juvies, and into the nearby woods. Connor and Risa both want to survive until they turn eighteen, when they legally cannot be unwinded, but Lev is dead set on getting himself unwound.
Unwind was well written, carefully crafted, and its cover is beautifully designed. In other words, I really liked Unwind. Of course, I love dystopias, so I’m biased, but I feel like I’d like the book anyway even if I wasn’t. I thought it told a very coherent story and I loved the base plot and setting.
Unwind covered all the base parts of exposition and characterization, but that’s not very unique to Unwind. Any good book does that. In one book, I watched all three characters cover massive growth, which is my favorite part about books, but character growth is essential to the plot, too.
I think the reason I liked Unwind so much was the relationship the characters have with each other. It’s simultaneously weird, reluctant, and impulsive, but the three elements somehow click together and make it work. You get to see the rawness of human emotion and thinking within our three main characters and what they face together.
o anyone with a taste for dystopia or sci-fi.
