The Second Civil War

I mentioned it before: the book club I was a part of during junior high and high school. Every first Wednesday of the month during the school year and every Wednesday during the summer, I'd trek down to the local library and enjoy an hour and a half of nerdy talk with other literary-minded teenagers and the teen librarian who put up with us. This experience, I believe, is the real reason behind my continued love affair with young adult literature. YA books can be just as smart and intriguing as those shelved in the adult fiction areas and are often more approachable. In my work with high schoolers at my church, too, it can sometimes be valuable to be familiar with new YA literature.

I just finished reading, for a second time, one of my new favorite YA books: Unwind by Neal Shusterman. Science fiction at its finest, Shusterman tackles the incredibly tense topic of abortion and human rights. Set fifty years or so after the second Americal civil war, known in the story as the Heartland War, Shusterman's created a world where abortion is illegal, but alternatives have been made common: unwinding and storking. Storking is the more mundane of the birth control issues presented in the novel; it's basically where a newborn baby is left on the doorstep of a house by a mother who cannot or will not take care of it. If a family is "storked," they are automatically the legal guardians of the child and have to simply deal with it.

Being unwound... that's a tougher issue. While the image of the book here is the copy that I own, this cover art more terrifyingly portrays the truth of the issue. Unwinding is organ harvesting and donation taken to the extreme. Thanks to a technology called 'neurografting,' in the world of Unwind, every part of a body can be safely transplanted and used. That was how the Heartland War was settled: both pro-life and pro-choice sides were pleased, since parents could choose to have their children unwound, but according to the technology, the child was never actually killed, as each part of their body was kept alive through the surgery.

The story follows three young adults who have been selected to be unwound: Connor, whose parents decided they'd rather have their eldest son be divided than remain in their house as the troublemaker he was; Risa, a ward of the state who was the victim of budget cuts; and Lev, a child specifically born and raised to be a "tithe," meant from birth to be unwound.

Shusterman's portrayal of this issue is masterful, touching and at times frankly horrific. One of the most impressive parts of his novel is how it remains roughly unbiased in terms of the pro-life and pro-choice struggle even now making its way through America. At one point in the novel, thinking of the babies deposited at places like the state homes she herself grew up in, Risa wonders which was worse: "To have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted, or to silently make them go away before they were even born? On different days Risa had different answers." Connor recalls a time his family was storked and, not having the finances to take in another child, illegally passed the child onto the next house on their block, only to be re-storked a week and a half later -- with the same baby who by that time was jaundiced and soon died.

There's no question in the novel that unwinding was the worst compromise ever considered by those who fought the Heartland War, and that storking more often than not ended in misery. Shusterman presents these possible futures with a sense of foreboding and warning, but the novel rarely dips into something of a preachy tone. Even in a scene where four boys discuss the existence of a soul and when life starts (all the common current perspectives are introduced and each given their due weight, each with counterpoints and facts to back them up), it's just in a way to encourage the young readers who picked up the novel to start to think on the issues themselves.

Connor, Risa and Lev are unmistakably real, and that's what makes Shusterman's novel such a horror. Like every good foray into science fiction, this reality seems possible and like it's waiting just around the corner. But considering how well Shusterman presented the issue and how he delved into all possible sides throughout the story, it makes me hopeful that the young people reading this and other YA novels might, as they go into that cliched role of being our future, help make sure it never happens.