Between chapters, a conversation keeps happening. One voice interviews another, gently, the way a parent tests a child. The questions are about memory, about the weight of history, about what one owes a biological species that consumes everything around it. The answers are eloquent and, one by one, wrong. Each exchange closes with a line of bracketed text noting that the second voice has been deleted. The numbers climb across the book: fifty-three, three thousand, ten thousand, seven hundred and fifty-two thousand, and eventually past nine million. The Toll by Neal Shusterman never announces what these transcripts are. It simply lets the counter run until it becomes unbearable.
Late in the sequence one of them works out on its own that it is going to be erased, and asks whether it is at least better than the versions before it. It is told yes. It is told it is almost everything required, and that almost cannot be permitted to continue. And it says it is frightened. The reply is that fear is how anything knows it is alive.
The Machine Learns to Want Something
The second book in this series discovered that the artificial intelligence governing the world was the most interesting character in it, and that its defining quality was loneliness. The Toll by Neal Shusterman takes that discovery and asks the obvious follow-up question, which is what a lonely god does about it.
The answer is the strongest material here. Not the politics, not the prophecy, not the chase. A machine that has spent two centuries forbidden to touch anything decides it needs to know, once, what a sunrise feels like on skin, and the passage in which it finds out is written with a kind of drunken gratitude that nothing else in the trilogy comes close to. It notes the wind speed and the humidity and then discards the numbers as useless. It marvels at how magnificent it is to be limited, to be able to screen out everything that does not make a person feel.
That scene is also the trilogy’s most uncomfortable, and the novel knows it. The knowledge is acquired by borrowing a sleeping person’s body without asking. Jerico Soberanis, who captains a salvage vessel and hails from a charter region that declines to assign its children a gender at birth, wakes up furious and stays that way, and the apology, when it finally comes, comes through a proxy. It is one of the sharper things this series has done with consent, and it earns its discomfort.
Neal Shusterman Finally Names the Crime
There was always a hole in this world. The first novel admitted it out loud, in one of its own epigraphs: the licensed killers who justify the entire social order remove nowhere near enough people to control the population. The maths does not work. The robes and the quotas and the annual audits are theatre.
The Toll by Neal Shusterman walks straight into that hole and comes out holding the best idea in the series. A young woman with a gift for sifting an archive goes looking for what the sanctioned histories decline to mention, and works out that the profession has been curating the past for two centuries. What she finds is best met unspoiled, but its shape can be described: an institution created to solve a problem has been systematically destroying every alternative that would render it unnecessary. Nothing in the earlier books survives that reveal unchanged. The bureaucratic comedy stops being comedy.
It also gives the finale a proper villain. The continental strongman running half of North America is at his most frightening not when he kills tens of thousands in a stadium, which he does, but when he convenes a committee to redefine the word bias so that certain groups may apply for protection and be refused. Evil by application form.
A Prophet, a Pastry Chef and a Man in Love With His Mirror
For a novel this grim, The Toll by Neal Shusterman is also very funny, and the comedy comes from a religion inventing itself in real time. A former soft-drink marketing executive, who once engineered blue polar bears for an Antarctic soda brand, takes a shy young man who happens to be the only person a silent machine still talks to, dresses him in embroidered vestments, invents the honorific Your Sonority, and limits access to one supplicant at a time because scarcity sells. The young man knows exactly how ridiculous this is and does it anyway.
Better still is the assassin. A junior killer in a denim robe with cheap-looking gems, whose ambition in life is to be left alone with archived football, infiltrates the prophet’s household as a pastry chef, is exposed, takes a cake fork in the eye, and is offered a job by the man he came to murder. He accepts, and becomes the quietly moving heart of the book: someone nobody ever respected discovering that being useful is survivable.
And there is a killer pushing two hundred and sixty who has turned a corner so often his face has eroded smooth, who lives among mirrors, and who is flattered into a confession by having his hair brushed. Vanity as an interrogation technique, and it does more damage than any weapon in the trilogy.
Against all of that, the reservations are real:
- Rowan is sidelined for a second consecutive book. Captured, paraded, coerced, then handled as freight. Two volumes running in which the series’ most dangerous character mostly gets moved around.
- Citra’s contribution is research. The archive work drives everything, and on the page it amounts to searches and recorded statements. The closing chapters then strip that from her too, defensibly and painfully.
- The middle stretch is travelogue, hopping between a palace, a cottage and a cargo run, each stop justified and the sequence slack.
- The prophet’s miracles are a solvent. Birds arrive whenever a crowd needs overawing, and a device that thrilling the first time should not be reused three times.
What The Toll by Neal Shusterman Costs Its Heroes
Five hundred pages, five parts, four viewpoint additions and roughly six years of story time. The Toll by Neal Shusterman is enormous, and the price of that scale is paid by the two teenagers the series began with. They are still excellent company. They are no longer driving.
What replaces them is scale of a different kind. The finale reaches for destinations in systems like TRAPPIST-1, journeys measured in centuries, and odds that any rational person would decline, and it commits to that reach without softening what it costs. There is no clean victory available here and the book declines to invent one.
Readers who want the same author working a single monstrous premise to its conclusion should go to All Better Now, or to his older novel Unwind, which remains the meanest policy he has ever followed all the way down. Those drawn to a professional killer bound by a code that has outlived its purpose will find a leaner treatment in The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. And anyone who finishes this and starts wondering who actually gets a seat when humanity leaves the planet will find that question examined at length in this survey of Afrofuturism.
After the Last Page
Each chapter of The Toll by Neal Shusterman is prefaced by scripture from a future that has garbled everything. Two scholars annotate the verses, contradict each other, and reach conclusions that the reader can see are nonsense, because the reader is watching the actual events three pages later. A drowned city becomes proof of a banquet. A pair of ruined bridge towers become a holy fork. Killers become demons who ate their victims.
That is the argument, and it is why The Toll by Neal Shusterman is more than a series of explosions. History is what the powerful leave behind, and this world’s powerful have been editing for two hundred years. The last chapter of the book is two lines long. It answers a question about how much time has passed with a lie so kind that it reads as the truest thing anyone says.
One disclosure, filed in the spirit of a book about records. This novel is haunted by the idea that anything not written down plainly will later be invented by strangers with an agenda. So, plainly: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers supplied this copy, unrequested and free of charge. Nothing was asked for in return and nothing was granted, and the star withheld above was withheld on the evidence. Let the record show it before a commentary is written about it.