Review: Unwind
“I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless."
Unwind
Neal Shusterman
358 pages - 2007 - fiction, dystopian
February 15th, 2025 — February 17th, 2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I have thought a lot about what I want to happen to my body when I die. I don’t mean in the religious sense—there’s no way to know for sure, so I don’t really want to bother thinking about it when there are more pressing matters to attend to on Earth at the moment. I mean my physical body, without “me” in it.
Personally, I want to be placed in a tree pod, or laid out in a forest, or placed in a body farm. Maybe I want my body to be donated to science. I definitely want my healthy organs to go to those who may need them, since I won’t be using them much at that point anyway. One thing is for certain—I do not want to be embalmed.
I always found it fascinating that the society in which I live finds so much taboo about death. There are so many euphemisms for dying in common English. It’s brought up in hushed tones. And yet it is one of the only things that we, as human beings, all share.
In my thinking of passing on, I realized that my main desire is for my atoms and minerals and organs to be put to good use. I want to become food for forest creatures or fuel for mushrooms to replenish the nutrients in the soil. I want my eyes to offer new sight to someone who needs it, or my heart to continue beating in someone’s chest. There’s something comforting in living on in that way that I feel doesn’t really come with being pumped full of (environmentally harmful) chemicals and left to remain intact forever in a wooden or metal box somewhere in the ground.
I think this desire is at the heart of Unwound, but it is heavily corrupted. In this story, abortion is illegalized because so much strife had been caused over the pro-choice/pro-life debate; however, parents can choose to have their children “unwound” between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and every single part of their body down to their left pinky toe will be put to use somewhere (or in someone) else.
It’s a horrifying idea, but somehow in 2025 it’s not entirely bonkers. It’s not even completely implausible. That’s what made reading this book even more gripping at the moment. Part of it was escapism, sure, but another part of it was morbid fascination. I could see this scenario playing out within our current timeline (although I don’t know if the, ahem, scientists in charge of our health at the moment would be able to figure out the intimate details).
Summary (Spoilers!)
In a not-so-distant future, America has been split by another civil war, this time over the abortion debate, pro-life versus pro-choice. As a result, a new set of amendments, called the Bill of Life, was added to the Constitution. It states that abortion is federally illegal; however, parents of a child can choose to have their child “unwound” between the ages of 13 to 18. This means that they will be sent to a facility that will take them apart and divide their pieces up to those that need it, such as a child with asthma (new lung) or a man who loses an arm (new arm).
Connor Lassiter is a sixteen-year-old boy with less than perfect grades and a bit of a hot streak, getting into fights at school. One day he finds papers that his parents signed, saying that he will be unwound. Connor decides to run away, and asks his girlfriend, but she refuses, so he runs away alone.
Connor finds his way into a truck headed north, but he is discovered by police. He starts to run, causing a pile-up on the freeway. A school bus crashes. Another car swerves out of the way, inside of which is a thirteen-year-old boy named Lev who is also on his way to be unwound.
Lev, however, is a tithe; he is a child that was chosen from a young age to be unwound as a sacrifice to god. He is the tenth child of his parents and grew up looking forward to his unwinding.
Connor sees the boy, dressed in pristine white clothes, and takes him hostage into the woods. The boy’s pastor is in the driver’s seat and tells Lev to run, which confuses the tithe.
Meanwhile, a young girl stumbles out of the school bus that had crashed. Her name is Risa, and she was a child living in state homes due to her orphaned status. Due to a random draw, she was chosen to be unwound to make room for more of the orphans. She had been on a bus headed slowly towards her unwinding. She runs with the boys.
On their journey, they find themselves in a residential community when they’re spotted by some policemen. While running, they hear the cry of a baby, and Connor impulsively runs and picks it up. We learn that, within the Bill of Life, another law was passed that made it so that a baby could be “storked”—if a baby was left on your porch, and you found it there, legally it became your ward and you took on the responsibility for it.
Connor tells Risa and Lev that he had to take the baby because of lasting guilt that he and his family hold. When he was younger, his family had found a baby storked on their porch. Not wanting the responsibility of another child, they passed it to the neighbors. However, the neighbors did the same; the baby went all the way around the neighborhood for two weeks, with nobody caring for it. Eventually, the child died, and everyone forever had to live with the guilt that they killed it.
The three of them, now with a baby, make their way to a school to blend in with the other children. They hide in a bathroom throughout the day, attempting not to be seen. Lev, however, sneaks away to the office while the baby is crying and tells the administration that he has been kidnapped and is a tithe. He warns them of the other two unwinds hiding in the bathroom and asks to make a phone call.
He thinks of calling his parents to tell them that he was still alive for the moment, and say goodbye, but instead he calls Pastor Dan. Lev is shocked to hear that Dan wants him to lay low, not tell anybody he’s still alive, and escape his tithing. Dan essentially says that he should try to live, rather than sacrificing himself. Lev hangs up and rethinks nearly his entire life.
He pulls the fire alarm, and in the commotion, the children and the baby find a teacher who is willing to help them. She takes the baby and gets them past the policemen, who arrived quickly to take away the unwinds. She tells the kids to go to an antique store, where a woman named Sonia will help them. Lev, on the other hand, runs off into the woods on his own.
They head there and are taken in to Sonia’s basement safe house, where there are three other unwinds hiding away—Hayden, Mai, and Roland. The latter is a tattooed, strong-looking punk that immediately starts causing trouble. Connor and he butt heads almost immediately.
While they’re in the basement, the kids tell Mai the story of Humphrey Dunfee. Legend has it that a child named Humphrey was unwound, but his parents, in their guilt and grief, went on a killing spree and murdered everyone who got one of their child’s parts.
The children bounce between safe houses and end up in a warehouse run by adults called the Fatigues. Roland continues to cause trouble, and rumors spread through the house that he has a weapon and is planning to fight Connor again. Risa tells Connor to lay low; one day, Roland corners her in the background and threatens to assault her; Connor briefly intervenes, but pretends he doesn’t care, so Roland loses interest and lets Risa go.
One day, Connor and Risa are flown in shipping containers to a desert yard in Arizona, where decommissioned planes are sent. Here, a man named The Admiral runs a sort of labor camp, called The Graveyard, where kids who are escaping being unwound can help him do work, and in return, he’ll take care of them until they turn 18 and no longer can legally be unwound.
Connor is in a crate with a boy named Diego, whom they nickname Emby, short for “mouth breather”—he had pulmonary fibrosis and was given an unwind’s lung that was asthmatic. When they arrive, they learn that five boys in one of the containers suffocated during transit.
The Admiral runs the camp with the help of the Goldens, who are seventeen-year-olds about to become adults. Connor is suspicious of The Admiral and becomes a mechanic in the camp; Risa becomes a medic; Roland finds his way towards becoming the apprentice of a helicopter pilot named Cleaver.
Lev, meanwhile, meets a child named Cyrus Finch, nickname CyFi, who is making his way towards a small town in Missouri. Lev learns that CyFi had received a transplant of an unwind’s frontal lobe, whose name was Tyler. He often feels urges to steal items, a holdover from Tyler’s kleptomania. When they get to Missouri, CyFi’s fathers are there at the house of Tyler’s parents. CyFi is taken over by the impulses of the frontal lobe and ends up begging “his” parents not to unwind him. Lev runs away and makes it to The Graveyard as well.
Connor is asked to help The Admiral with his coffeemaker one day in his designated plane; upon arriving, he learns that the coffeemaker is not broken. Connor accuses The Admiral of harvesting the kids’ body parts for himself. The Admiral instead shows him that he has dentures, not transplanted teeth, and then shows Connor that someone had murdered the Goldens and left them in a shipping container. He wants Connor’s help finding who did it.
Connor tries to keep a low profile. Roland, meanwhile, spreads rumors that The Admiral is trying to find the best body parts for himself. The Admiral tells Connor privately that he was a part of the “third side” of the Heartland War—he just wanted peace. The Bill of Life was proposed as something bizarre, and they expected that both sides would see how ridiculous they were being. Instead, the opponents agreed, and the bill was signed into law. When The Admiral’s son, Harlan, started acting out, The Admiral was pressured into unwinding his child.
Lev finds himself in a group with Mai and Blaine, both of whom are rather glum, emo children. They say that they want to make the people unwinding children pay for what they’re doing. Lev, angry with the world, agrees to help.
Emby is sent away by The Admiral, and kids quietly figure it out. Emby, before being whisked away, learns that The Admiral’s last name is Dunfee. Connor locks Roland in a shipping container and tries to get him to confess to the murder of the Goldens. When the other kids in the camp realize that Connor and Roland are “missing” too, they start to riot, destroying planes and property and burning what they can.
Risa is in a plane with The Admiral during the riot, and locks them inside to protect them. He starts having a heart attack. Cleaver is injured in the riots as well; he mentions something about suffocation, and Connor realizes that it was him, not The Admiral, that killed the Goldens.
Risa, Roland, and Connor get The Admiral out of the plane and into the helicopter. In Roland’s apprenticeship, he had learned how to fly. They head to a hospital and crash-land. The Admiral is cared for, as are the children, but Roland tells of their status and the three are sent to the Happy Jack Harvest Camp.
The harvest camp is the last resort for unwinds. It includes a harvest facility, nicknamed the Chop Shop, where kids are unwound and harvested. Connor, upon arriving, has quite a reputation. Stories have spread about the “Akron AWOL” that caused a pileup on the highway and kidnapped another unwind. Risa, for her piano skills, is given a role playing in the band. They are stationed on the roof of the Chop Shop and play music for the kids being led inside.
Roland tries to strangle Connor one day as tensions rise, but can’t do it. The older, tattooed boy is taken by counselors to be unwound. The readers get to experience it with him, learning that the kids legally have to be kept conscious and numbed for as much of the experience as possible. Slowly they take away parts of him, starting at the feet and moving up, until eventually they take his eyes, ears, and brain, and he is scattered.
Connor is next in line to be unwound. Lev, too, has made it to Happy Jack. We learn that he, Mai, and Blaine had volunteered for a work trip with Cleaver as a ruse. Instead, the three of them were turned into clappers—their blood was replaced with a flammable substance, and a clap of their hands could detonate them like bombs. They chose to do this as a way to retaliate. If they’re going to die, they want to take down some of the people causing this harm and pain.
They make a plan to blow up the Chop Shop before Connor can be unwound. Lev is late, however, and the other two explode before he gets inside. Lev can’t bring himself to detonate, so instead he runs into the collapsing building and saves a few people, including Connor and Risa, and then waits with them for ambulances.
Connor wakes up two weeks later after being placed in a medically-induced coma. He was badly injured and has received a transplanted eye and right arm. He recognizes that the tattoo on the arm is one that Roland had had. Risa is also in the hospital and was injured as well. She is now paralyzed from the waist down. She had the option to have a spinal transplant but denied it; now that she is officially “disabled”, she can’t be unwound.
Lev is kept in a specialized padded room in federal prison while they remove the explosives from his system. Pastor Dan visits him and tells him that his parents did not want to take him back, and that he has left the church. Lev has become the face of a movement, appearing on magazines and in the news. CyFi, his old friend, spoke out in support of Lev and against the process of unwinding. A movement has started to fight against it.
Meanwhile, The Admiral and his wife hold a party—the invitees are all the recipients of their son’s body parts. Harlan Dunfee had been unwound, but when they’re all together, they converge into a memory of Harlan and even speak as one person for a brief moment. Emby is there because he had gotten Harlan’s lung. Connor and Risa go back to The Graveyard to continue the work and help save more kids from this fate.
Head to Toe
It has been a long time since I read a book that made me gasp aloud. I’m not sure I remember the last one, to be honest. But learning that Connor had received Roland’s arm, based on the detail of the tattoo—my reaction was completely involuntary.
The book revels in its handling of detail. Nothing was superfluous; even the mention of Emby’s transplanted asthmatic lung found its way back into the story as a whole. I found it immensely compelling. I did not want to put it down.
In fact, today, I was reading it on my lunch break at work. Bad idea? Absolutely—that was when I got to the point of Roland’s unwinding procedure. If I was in ideal conditions, I would have curled up in a dark room and thought about that passage alone for a few hours. Instead, I had to continue working in my science lab, mixing together clear liquids and trying not to think of the horrors I had just read.
I was most surprised that this book was marketed towards teenagers. I think it’s on par with Tender is the Flesh, which I read not too long ago. It’s another dystopian book where people are grown for parts, specifically meat. In quite a few ways, Unwind was even more brutally unsettling.
I also loved the humanity in the story. In having it told through the perspective of unwinds, we are hyperaware of the injustice and terror that comes with that sentencing. Tender is the Flesh is told from the perspective of a human who ends up with one of the livestock humans; it still is a story of rebellion against the system, but we never see inside the meat-woman’s head. Unwind, though, shows the awful reality that many of the characters don’t see—these kids are just humans. They’re just like them, or their kids, but have been deemed such that they are seen as a walking set of parts to be taken and used.
Of course, it’s a metaphor for all sorts of prejudice. The word “umber” is used instead of Black to describe those with darker skin, and despite it coming about as a way to combat racism, it naturally delves into the depths of discrimination. Risa is a wonderful pianist, but her mere quality of being from state homes leads to her prescription of being unwound.
There were a multitude of details that I found fascinating. Tithes of every religion ended up in the same harvest camps. Transplanted body parts hold onto muscle memory, such as when a truck driver performs a card trick for Connor that only the original owner knew how to do. The explosive fluid in the blood, probably similar to nitroglycerin, is only flagged by medics examining the clappers for having high triglycerides, and they’re sent off with a warning to eat healthier diets.
Naturally, too, it’s a Holocaust analog, with children literally being sent to death camps. It’s another poignant reminder. With the “detention camps” being set up by the current US administration, it’s important to speak up against them and call them what they are. Unwind is set in the not-too-distant future that I fear we are fast approaching. If you’re reading this, try your best to speak up against the horrible discrimination that your neighbors, colleagues, and friends might be facing. Nobody should be forced to flee their homes.
Total pages read so far, 2025: 2,463
Total books read so far, 2025: 7
Next book: Clever Girl by Hannah McGregor