The Line by Teri Hall

Can you believe it, I have finished the book I just started yesterday!  This was a really short book (at least for me) about 225 pages and thankfully the sequel "Away" is to be released on September 15th so that will be forthcoming on my reading list.

The Line is categorized as a YA (young adult) novel.  With that being said my qualifications on the content are less critical than a book that is geared towards a more mature reader.  However, I really don't have any criticisms of this book other than the slower start to lure me in.  I'd say I wasn't fully invested in the story until page 70 or so, which was about a third of the way through.  But from that point on the story kept building, the tension continued to mount until the final page that left me wanting to know moreand to go further on this journey with the characters.  Luckily there was a 7 or 8 page 'tickler' of the next book included.

Although on a different scope, I consider this book a combination of a dystopian society following a mini post-apocalyptic event.  Government is in control to the extreme for the U.S. (now referred to as the Unified States), news and propaganda are filtered and changed before being fed out to society.  DNA is recorded at birth as a means of keeping track of people.  The list of government rules goes on and on, however there is a region of people who are not under this control.  They are the Others who inhabit the land on the other side of the Line.  They are Away.  The Line is a means of border control, keeps people out and keeps people in.  The people the Line is keeping, or kept, out though were it's own citizens.  Now after many years of being cut off, barely surviving, a young boy makes his way to the Line in order to see if he can communicate with someone on the other side in order to get medicine for his sick and dying father.  That's where this story takes off.

Barriers have always existed in our past, continue in our present, so this barrier in the story isn't hard to believe there is a sense of reality.  The Berlin Wall, Japanese segregation camps after the Pearl Harbor attack, apartheid in South Africa are all examples of barriers.  They seem apalling to us, but at one time they made perfect sense to someone otherwise they would not have existed.  And so the Line exists too.

The Line in my opinion represents fear.  Fear then builds upon itself and becomes an entity.  What would happen if one of the Others crossed over or vice versa?  You'll have to read to find out for yourself. 

This is Teri hall's debut novel.  Again, I have linked the authors webpage to the photo of the book in the post. 

Books along the same genre that I have read of recent would include "1984" by George Orwell, "The Year of the Flood" by Margaret Atwood, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy and "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" by Ranson Riggs.  If you have read and enjoyed any of these, then you will undoubtedly want to read The Line.