Book Review: ‘The Toll’ by Neal Shusterman

The Toll is the final book in Neal Shusterman’s young adult dystopian trilogy: Arc of a Scythe.

The novel features an ensemble of characters and several different plotlines that weave in and out of each other. Set predominantly three years after the events of Thunderhead, The Toll explores an ever-bleaker world under the command of Overblade Goddard. Some of the novel’s key plotlines include: the reaction to Citra and Rowan’s rescue from the city of Endura, Greyson’s life as the religious figurehead ‘The Toll’ and his mission to bring harmony to the increasingly violent Tonists, and Scythe Faraday and the secret community shipwrecked on the Atolls.

This trilogy started out with an in-depth focused look at the lives of Rowan and Citra in Scythe. I was surprised by just how far the focus of The Toll pulled out to show us such a large cast of new and returning characters as well as a much wider view of the world and the factions within it.

The inclusion of this expanded group of characters felt like both a positive and a negative. On the positive size, I am a big fan of Shusterman’s world building and this range of perspectives from different nations and walks of life gave us a much broader view of the world of Scythe. The negative is that there often felt like an imbalance between which characters were highlighted and for how long. For example Rowan had a lot less to do in this book compared to previous instalments. There were also long waits to find out what happened to certain characters; such as the group on the Atolls. I would have preferred if the perspectives were alternated more regularly and Rowan and Citra were more pro-active in shaping events around them rather than begin caught up in the flow.

In my review of the trilogy’s second book Thunderhead I mentioned my concerns about the series’ use of shock resurrections of key characters. The Toll took the opposite approach by introducing us to several secondary characters throughout the novel only for many of them to fall before the story’s conclusion. Again I’m in two minds. While I’m pleased death was treated with more permanence in this book, I also wish that we’d gotten to spend more time with these ill-fated characters to increase the emotion felt at their passing.

As a conclusion to a trilogy, The Toll does a solid job at wrapping up its plotlines. All of the problems facing our characters are resolved and we learn what the future has in store for them. I would have liked for the villains to get more of a comeuppance than they did but that is my personal preference. Of the actual events of this finale, Shusterman found a good balance between proving enough clues to allow the reader to take a semi-accurate guess at what was going to happen without making the plot predictable and easy to work out.

I do have to mention a big issue or rather confusion I had during the novel’s first act. It becomes clear, based on clues in the early chapters, that the events we are reading are not happening in chronological order – with some character perspectives moving ahead of others. While all the plotlines do eventually sync up with each other I did find these unannounced shifts in time quite confusing.

While I would have to rank The Toll as my least favourite book in the trilogy, that is only because the bar was set high by Scythe and Thunderhead. Despite my mixed feeling at times, The Toll is still a good book and provides a good conclusion to the overall series. As a fan of both dystopian fiction and YA dystopias, I’m really pleased I picked up this series and gave it a chance.

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