Unwinding is the central idea of the novel, but it doesn’t just stop there. The main characters-Conner, Risa, and Lev-are all Unwinds who escape and go on the run. Now, unborn children cannot be touched, but after birth to the age of eighteen, children can be “unwound.” What this means, basically, is that every body part is surgically disconnected and donated elsewhere so that the Unwind is not technically dead, but is instead split up amongst hundreds of other people, an arm there, a heart here, and so on. The novel is set in some unspecified time in which the abortion issue has resulted in a war (in which no one won) that has come and gone. As usual, Shusterman’s science fiction is more imaginative and better fleshed out than the average writer’s. I eventually decided just to go for it and buy it because Neal Shusterman is generally brilliant (I recommend both Full Tilt and Scythe), and it turned out to be a good call, because Unwind was easily on par with the other masterpieces. I heard about Unwind by Neal Shusterman from a number of people, but delayed reading it for a long time because my library doesn’t have it.
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