Review: The Toll

The Toll by Neal Shusterman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Shusterman took almost two years to bring us the follow-up to Thunderhead and conclusion to Arc of a Scythe, and seeing this 600-page brick grace the shelves at my work and my library, that's no surprise. Bringing one of his finest stories full circle, Shusterman begins nearly around the time of the Great Resonance that signaled the disappearance of the Thunderhead from the world after Scythe Goddard lost the election, then threw his little snit fit and wiped out the vast majority of the upper echelons of the Scythedom and sank the fortress island of Endura under the Atlantic...


...yeah, that ending of Thunderhead still had me reeling after all this time, and that's even before I bring up how Greyson Tolliver became the Toll, the only one capable of hearing and speaking for the Thunder in the wake of the Tone, effectively making him the perfect prophet for the Tonists. And painting the most massive possible target on his back thanks to Goddard's continued machinations.

It takes a full three years before Citra and Rowan get back into the action, by which time we're also introduced to another important new character - Jericho, aka Jeri, a genderfluid sea captain who's one of my favorite Shusterman characters since Connor the Akron AWOL. Jericho's another example of the Thunderhead setting aside certain parts of the world to not run the same society of the rest of the Scythedom - in this future world, Jeri's native Madagascar raises children genderless so they may choose their gender as adults, and Jericho almost gleefully flummoxes everyone else's perceptions of them at every turn with a combination of fluid identity and sheer badassery.

I will spoil nothing of the fight to bring down the dictatorship of "Overblade" Goddard once and for all, but I will say that as long as this book is? Shusterman pulls some genius moves, loading all the best twists into the final hundred pages or so. He once again proves himself as one of the best in the business in a series that seriously mows down the Unwind Dystology as his best work - tbh, Unwind was great in and of itself, but the sequels kinda sagged a bit in comparison. Whereas this series? Densely packed with some of the smartest and most on-point world-building and commentary in all of YA.

To Arc of a Scythe, I now bid ave atque vale.

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