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I really ought to give this book 1 star for Jeri alone. If you don’t know what "tokenism" is, you will understand this term after reading The Toll.

But let me get to the novel in general first, before I start ranting about Jeri specifically.

When I finished rereading Thunderhead a couple of days ago, I did so with trepidation and excitement. What will come out of the thrilling cliff-hangers, I thought? Where will Goddard lead his New Order? What is the future of the Scythedom? How will humanity handle the absence of the Thunderhead in its lives? What will the roles of Rowan and Citra be, if they do indeed survive? Will humanity reform itself in any kind of profound way? How will people handle the impending overpopulation problem, if left to their own devices?

What Shusterman delivered in The Toll, was a messy, overlong, boring, meandering novel that also tried to be a commentary on the present day American political climate, or so it seemed. It culminated in the ending that was both neatly predictable and satisfying and at the same time a total copout.

The pacing and plot structure needed more work. There was a ton of characters introduced that ultimately had no bearing on the story arc. They lived, they did some inconsequential busy work, they died, or whatever. Easily, 200 pages could have been trimmed away. The whole Toll story line while it dabbled in an interesting idea of how religions are born, was long and sucked a lot of oxygen out of the narrative. Citra and Rowan had minimal, and mostly thankless, roles of star-crossed lovers to play in this novel, and not much else.

But the most massive disappointment for me was by far the development of Goddard. I truly couldn't understand how he managed to consolidate his power, being a nonsensical tantrum-y psycho mass-killing villain that he was in The Toll. Granted, there hadn’t been much to his agenda in either Scythe or Thunderhead, but here, in The Toll was an opportunity for Goddard to be explained. Goddard had such a strong following, but why? There is a paragraph in this novel that actually could have been a great motivator for following someone like Goddard. What IS an immortal humanity without scythes, without the threat of death, the only thing that stirs the blood of people, the only limitation and the only fear? This is the question at the a core of this series, IMO, but the way Shusterman answered it in the end, was no answer at all. In fact, the resolution obliterated any justification for ever considering creating the Scythedom with its violent methods in the first place.

Also not explained were changes in the rules of this world with Goddard suddenly able to run economies and have new administrative powers? I think Shusterman’s desire to bring current events and current president into the story to draw parallels changed his original world building to something that makes no sense at all.

Now, Jeri. Oh, Jeri. Jeri is the only gender-fluid person ever introduced in this series, and, the way I saw it, this character's main role was to be a mouthpiece for this particular “issue�� Shusterman had become suddenly and inexplicably interested in, and be objectified and used. You could literally tell Jeri was grafted on top of the narrative to deliver "the message", because there was nothing else for this character to do! That in this futuristic world, where people don’t die, can rejuvenate and reinvent themselves, have multiple families and lives and have an ample opportunity to explore everyone and everything, anyone would need a lecture on gender-fluidity, was absurd! I literally cringed in embarrassment for Shusterman while reading Jeri’s TED talks on the subject of the “gender fluid people are people too�� variety. This is not The Handmaid’s Tale, for goodness�� sake, we all have already understood that all social constructs like class, gender, race were a thing of the past in this series. Even though, it must be said, Shusterman himself never brought up any other sexual identity other than cis in the previous installments. Which makes Jeri's character even more questionable. I am going to assume that Shusterman came to creating Jeri from a well-meaning place, but it sure turned into an awkward, earnest, exploitative disaster, if you ask me.

A letdown.