The Line

I just read this book. I was really excited to find it doing a random walk-through in the library. Another dystopian novel, hooray (seriously, you have to know by now that these are basically my favorites and the plots have a way of drawing me in).

This book was kind of awful. It takes place in the future United States and the borders all around the whole thing have been shut down (there's an invisible barrier that keeps people in/out). The main character lives on The Property right near the border in this crazy society and wonders about what's on the other side. Turns out her mother and the owner of The Property have some secrets about the other side of The Line (which is what the barrier is called) in the land called Away. Sounds intriguing enough, right? Especially when you factor in the government secrecy and the changing of history and keeping secrets and militant enforcement of laws.

The writing is SO heavy handed. I don't know how exactly to explain what I mean. Her political point is thrown in with no delicacy and is kind of forced and the writing just isn't good (in my opinion). The plot isn't boring, but the writing is. I was trying to figure out why exactly when I was sitting in my sixth grade class (that's where I'm doing my student teaching) and the kids were learning about sentence fluency. The goal was for students to vary their sentence lenght and structure. I don't think Ms. Hall does this very well in this book. The writing frustrated me enough that even though there was a MASSIVE cliffhanger at the end, I won't be reading the others (if and when they are released).