It took me a while to sit down and write this review because I feel so so so conflicted about this book. For the first half I hated it because of the writing style. The sentences are short and it is written in the present tense. That alone made it extremely difficult to read. But then again, I couldn’t stop reading it. It was like a train wreck: you don’t want to look, but you can’t look away.

Unwind is the story about a future dystopian United States. It takes place after the second civil war, a war waged over reproductive rights. Essentially, it is illegal to kill a child under the age of 13, and life is defined as beginning at conception. However, once the child reaches 13 and before they are 18, they can be “unwound.” Being unwound involves having every organ and tissue harvested from the body and being transplanted in others, allowing the child to “live on” in another form. As with any dystopian novel, there are issues with this world building and history, but I am willing to overlook them for the sake of a story.

That being said, the story and characters have to be good. However, in Unwind, the characters had no personalities. They were not distinct, and they didn’t develop. In short, I could care less what happened to each of them. Though, honestly, that is probably for the better. There are several scenes in this book that I think if I were actually attached to the characters I emotionally wouldn’t have been able to handle it.

This is not a light-hearted book. It is filled with fear and warnings. While it appears to be like any other dystopian novel, I was shocked when there would be a passage that seemed quite philosophical. These parts felt out of place in the novel. Almost as if they were the parts the novel was built around. Either way, I enjoyed it. I don’t expect to read more of the series, but I don’t regret reading this one.