UnDivided

UnDivided by Neal Shusterman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Proactive Citizenry has finally revealed why Cam was created. To make an army of rewound teens for the military. The group has also suppressed technology that would render unwinding obsolete. Connor, Risa, Lev, and Cam struggle to stop unwinding and Proactive Citizenry while bringing the suppressed technology to the surface.

UnDivided was a satisfying conclusion to the Unwind dystology. It kept me in a nervous excited state that compelled me to keep reading until I finished it. The overall blind heartlessness of the world surprisingly still shocked me. It's terrifying to fathom that people could care so little about the atrocities going on around them, but it's unfortunately all too similar to the world today.

One of my favorite parts of this book and the series as a whole was the thick sense of desperation I felt when reading the book. Clearly it's easy to see why teens would be so desperate when almost the entire world wants them for their body parts. I still can't imagine in a normal setting how a parent could sign their child's life away. I can't even imagine any person being willing to sign a child away that they raised in the case of the storked children. Now for the poor kids who are wards of the state it's not at all difficult to fathom them simply being viewed as unfortunate budget cuts.

One part I disliked in UnDivided is it transformed itself into more and more of a dystopia as it took on more tropes like the evil corporation responsible for practically everyone's misery. I enjoyed it more in Unwind when the thought was the world was terrified of teenagers and found a brutally efficient way of dealing with them. That felt more genuine and less like an evil business man, sitting in dim light, at a desk with his fingers steepled, and waiting to laugh maniacally.

The other thing that bugged me was Camus Comprix's motives. The character's actions really don't make much sense for the majority of the series and UnDivided isn't really an exception. At this point I almost wish he didn't exist. He didn't really add anything to the story overall outside of showing Proactive Citizenry's lack of ethics, but that had already been firmly established and didn't need further bolstering.

UnDivided was a thrilling story of a world I hope never approaches becoming a reality.

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