As far as the Young Adult genre goes, I’d say Scythe is one of my favourites, and I much prefer it to The Hunger Games that it’s compared to, for its dark comedy, brilliant young protagonists with real challenges and emotions, and its originality. It makes what we’d know as an evil act of killing and breaking up families into some new everyday normality where death is not death, with ambudrones always on standby to revive those who have been killed (but there are loopholes!).

Overpopulation is a fact and the way to deal with it is the Scythedom, a cult-like organisation that gleans (kills) the mortals, filling a quota per year. In a comic style, Scythe Faraday, the scythe the two young main characters are introduced to, uses mortal-age statistics as his approach to selecting those he gleans: yearly road accidents, tragic deaths of heroes, etc. Mortal society lives in fear of the scythes wherever they crop up, and yearn for that opportunity to kiss a scythe’s ring that grants them immunity from being gleaned for a year.

Instead of the gritty, sinister, dystopian circumstances of The Hunger Games, which is tournament-oriented in its survival and killing, there are the personal challenges of Rowan and Citra who have both been taken on as apprentices by Scythe Faraday – two apprentices is unheard of -- but only one of them can make it to scythehood. And there are moral conundrums within the scythehood itself: should they enjoy gleaning and treat mortals as lambs to the slaughter, or should they put their honour above all else? Both these influences inform the apprentices’ trials, interesting the reader in how they’ll respond in that crucial moment when they’ll really be tested.

I enjoyed every chapter and I was so pleased I took the chance to read Scythe. It blasted through my expectations. If you’re a young adult fan, or not, you may be surprised by just how much there is to enjoy out of Scythe. It felt like an urban fantasy story, even though it was set in future Earth.