When a teen is unwound, their body parts, including their brains, are harvested and used for transplant. After a long and bloody time of battle, someone comes up with a King Solomon and the Baby-style solution: make abortion illegal but give parents the option of having a child 'unwound' once the child reaches their teen years if they are still unwanted. It is a war fought over reproductive rights. In Unwind, the story begins with a civil war in the United States, the Heartland War. In order to really hook the reader, there has to be an origin story, a reason for the dystopian world to have come into existence. The best kind of dystopian story is political. In my humble opinion, the Unwind Dystology rivals Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, both as an insight into our culture and as a cautionary tale.

However, this series does much more than just capitalize off of a trend. The sequels, UnWholly, UnSouled, and UnDivided came later, in quick succession, starting in 2012, riding the coattails of the admittedly sort-of-played-out YA dystopian trend. Unwind, the first book in the Dystology series, was published a while ago, in 2007. That way, if someone wants to read it, and the library's copy is checked out, they can just borrow mine! I've 'book talked' Unwind more times than I can count and I keep my own spare copy in my office in the library. It transcends its genre to engage a diverse group of readers. If someone comes into my library and asks for a book I love, I will hand them a copy of Unwind, no matter their age, because this YA dystopian title is relevant, plausible, and truly scary. In the spirit of No Shame November, though, I'm going to admit that the real reason I read YA is because… I love it! Normally, I might tell people that I read YA in my free time because I want to keep up-to-date for my job. Despite the fact that I celebrated my double sweet sixteen (my 32nd birthday) a couple of years ago, and therefore am not part of the target audience, I read tons of Young Adult Fiction. This does not mean that I'm a teenager who is a librarian, but rather a librarian who provides service to teens. Is that cheesy? Maybe, but the books are so good! What is a dystology? It's a made-up word (made up by author Neal Shusterman, of course) a portmanteau of dystopian and _-logy, as in a series of books.

The unwind dystology