Although this book was/is thought provoking, it's just too dark and disturbing for my liking. I guess it's a "good" dystopia because the author brings the reader into a world that is sickening, warped, upsetting and sad and raises lots of questions. It's a page turner, that's for sure but I wasn't all that pleased with the ending.

I would also have liked the story to provide some background about how society came to be this way...i.e. believing that children are the primary contribution people make to society. Also, it would have been nice to know if the Unit was only a way of life in Sweden or was the Unit representative of the world?

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Oh wow, I really enjoyed this book, left me with a haunted feeling and tears in my eyes. ( )

What a tale of social engineering! All the independent thinkers are cordoned off from the rest of society yet given complete freedom and pampering which encourages them to accept their situation. I wonder if this is a uniquely Swedish (or European) perspective, indicating what a universal health care and basic economic support system will eventually lead to. I fully expected to find that some of the residents found ways to escape, or that (cynically) we'd discover that recipients of the body harvests were wealthy and influential people. But this turned out to be a tale of people accepting the social norm. Still, there was no real conflict to drive the story forward, so I only rate this a 3 star.
This book was highly recommended to me by a friend who is a midwife & mother of 6. I wonder how that might have made her more appreciative of it's message. ( )

3.75 stars. This book takes place in Sweden, sometime in the near future. Dorret Weger has just turned 50 and must surrender her existence and dog, in order to be remanded to the Unit. 50 year old women and 60 year old men, deemed not needed by society go to the Unit, where they are subjected to various testing and organ harvesting. One is "dispensable" if s/he does not have children or does not create economic growth, so there are many artists and writers. Life is sterile but pleasant for the inhabitants, and Dorrit finds more friends than she has ever had before. Then she falls deeply in love, and miraculously gets pregnant despite her age. Has she become useful now, and what will happen to her, the father and the baby? A sympathetic worker provides her with a means to escape the Unit. Will they break out? What I liked best about this book was the way it conveyed the Swedish view of life, and a myriad of social issues. Excellent job by the translator. ( )

Review originally posted at Dangerously Cold Tea

On occasion, you come along novels that are so startling fresh and outspoken that they leave you thinking long after the last page. For most readers, The Unit is - or will be - one of those novels. It is a science-fiction premise but it is presented in a fashion most unlike the sci-fi we normally read: it is human and intimate in scope, yet approaches revolutionary ideas with an open-minded narrative that it's impossible to really put this book in one genre or another.

Our protagonist, Dorrit Weger, has been deemed by society expendable, so she is sent to a facility where she will be taken care of as they experiment on her person and eventually give away all her major organs away, leading to her death. She enters, perfectly resigned, but that doesn't make a good story, does it? So naturally, something happens to make her realize how terribly wrong this all is: she falls in love. And it is through this new relationship - and the memories she falls back on from time to time - that brings this character around in a new light, makes us question the novel's brave new world which we are thrust into from page one.

Like many novels of its ilk, The Unit has a controversial ending. Obviously, I won't say what happens, but it is the kind of ending to divide readers and have them question both Miss Holmqvist's motives as well as the true meaning of the story. The main question of the novel is never really answered by either Dorrit, the rest of the cast, or the narrative: is the world of the Unit wrong? That is a question better answered by the individual reader, to promote discussion over the touchy subjects brought up by Holmqvist's writing - and rightly so. Stories like 1984 and The Giver are classics because they bring up questions and leave their audience to provide their own answers. Only time will tell if The Unit will join their ranks.
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