A review by ravensandlace
Gleanings by Neal Shusterman

adventurous
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.0

tw: pet death, death, bullying, infidelity, explosions, terrorism

One of my favorite series, which I really don’t talk about enough, is the Arc of the Scythe. It has everything to make a perfect dystopian series. I love everything about the books. But one thing I had wished for while I read the books was some sort of lore book since the world is so massive and there is a lot of history that is incredibly interesting. While this wasn’t a lore book per se, I did gain more insight into the world and how it was created. 

So this is a collection of short stories. Originally, I was going to review each short story but some were only five pages and I didn’t have a lot of thoughts on them, just a couple sentences here and there. So I think with this review, I’m just going to talk about the ones that made an impact on me or the ones I liked the most. 

Formidable
This one was one of my favorites. It involved Scythes Michael Faraday and Marie Curie. This was when they were both young scythes and a certain event that is mentioned in the original trilogy. I enjoyed the brief history of the two scythes considering how important they were in the trilogy, as I mentioned above. Overall, this was a good one. 

Unsavory Row
This one was more about unsavories. For those that don’t know, unsavories are people who the Thunderhead deems naughty. There are different levels to being an unsavory and it depends on what you do and how much trouble you get into. In this story, we get to see the aftermath of when a person’s family member gets gleaned and decides to become unsavory. I enjoyed the different viewpoint since, in the original series, we don’t interact a lot with unsavories. I learned a lot about a different part of the world. 

A Martian Minute
This particular story had a profound effect on me and out of all the stories, this is the one I remembered the best. I won’t say much because it’s a massive spoiler for one of the books in the series but let’s just say, after I read this story, I had to sit and just breathe for a minute and I’m sure you will too.

Perchance to Glean
This one was probably the most unusual out of the group of stories. The setting was set in Antarctica and there was this concept of dreams. At first, I was unsure of how these dreamscapes worked but after a while, it made sense. Think of the movie Inception. It worked kind of like that or at least that’s how I figured it worked. There was some Nightmare on Elm Street inspiration since Scythes could glean you in the dream world and you would actually be gleaned in the real world. A fascinating story. 

Overall, this was a wonderful collection of stories. It added more depth to the Scythedom. I also appreciated the different authors who contributed. I do wish this had been more of a lore book. It would have been nice to read the story of how the Thunderhead came to be, how everything progressed, etc. But overall, I truly did enjoy this book and it’s certainly a must read for anyone who enjoyed the Scythedom books. 
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