UnWholly by Neal Shusterman

In the acknowledgements, Shusterman says that he had envisioned UnWind as a stand alone novel. Indeed, it reads as a self-contained story. Most of the narrative lines are tied up in the end and, if the world isn't fixed by the events of the story, there is definite positive change. It doesn't really call for a sequel. In fact, there doesn't seem to be room for a sequel.

I always get a little leery when that is the case and I find that series just continues on when the author hadn't initially planned for it. My fear is always that the succeeding books are just going weaken the narrative and ruin my memory of the first book. If I weren't also plagued by intense curiosity, I'd probably just ignore the extra books. However, I am the proverbial cat and I just have to know.

In this particular case, Shusterman did a good job extending the story. It didn't feel forced or artificial, it just felt like a natural extension of the narrative.

The whole series is an examination of the ethics of organ harvesting taken to an extreme. In this world, no fetus can be aborted and their existence is protected until they reach the age of 13. At that point, they can be "UnWound" or basically taken a part for organs and tissue. The idea is that their lives continue in their hosts.  Of course the kids slated for unwinding don't take a lot of  comfort in that. From the first book, Conner, Risa, and Lev pick up in their own narratives and add chapters from the point of view of Cam, a complete human built out of unwind parts, Nelson, the juvie cop that Conner tranqed in UnWind, and Starkey, a storked kid that ends up in the camp in the airplane graveyard.

If Unwind is about the simple struggle of three kids who just want to survive, UnWholly is about an entire culture resistant to change and how much of the government is owned by the corporations who feed on the system as it already is. Cam is an interesting exploration on the question of what makes a human human. He's built out of pieces of 99 individual unwinds, so no one donor could be said to be dominant. It's an interesting character and the question is left hanging.

There are two more books in the series and I'm planning to read them both.