My book club is back! After an almost 4-year hiatus, we have resumed, and our first book back is The Measure.
The Measure left me disturbed. I can’t remember the last time I vacillated between wanting to rate a book one star and five stars. Yes, you read that right.
Without giving more away than in the first few pages, The Measure tells the story of what happens when every single person in the world (22 and older), wakes to find a box at their front door. On the box is their name and the words, “The measure of your life lies within.” Inside the box is a string. The strings are different lengths.
Hopefully, you can imagine the chaos that ensues. The author, Nicki Erlick tells that story through the viewpoints of roughly eight different characters. Some with short strings, some with long strings and some that chose not to look.
My vacillation occurs because in the first season, Spring, (The Measure is broken into 5 seasons, and then years later), it felt as if the author was using the story to rag about society’s ills rather than tell the story. We had comments on all of these:
- The internet
- Litigiousness of our society
- Social media (more than once)
- Healthcare as a privilege and not a right
- Our endless news cycle
- Mass shootings
- Healthcare disparity amongst our population
- Stigma of the angry black woman
from different characters.
Once past that though, we get more into the human stories. We see the effects on the “long stringers” and “short stringers”. Shades of the Blue Eye/Brown Eye experiment shine through. And then we are left pondering the heavy questions:
- Are our lives predetermined?
- Is there a divine being? If not, who sent the boxes?
- Do we measure the value of our lives in the years lived or our actions?
- What would we do? With whom would we choose to share our time if we had a “glimpse” of the future?
- Are the strings a gift or a curse?
And all these questions made for an extremely deep and interesting book club discussion.
For me, there were a couple of things I missed that ended up affecting my final rating.
First, after the initial deluge of boxes, each person, upon turning 22 received their box. Consequently, I wish there was some delving into the possibility of people camping outside the door of an almost 22-year-old to see how/when the box appears. I mean if my cousin and I could stay up all night trying to catch Santa sneaking into our neighbor’s house (we are Jewish so no Santa for us), you think people would do that to see the boxes.
Second, while the author touched upon the religious aspect slightly, I wish she had expanded on that topic. To me, these boxes seem clear proof of some sort of omniscient entity. Yet there was no discussion on how that information affected mankind or the different religious factions in our world.
In the end, I landed at four stars on GoodReads and 4.5 stars on StoryGraph (StoryGraph allows for you to have partial stars).