I read The Measure by Nikki Erick for book club. I thought this book had an interesting premise but a poor execution. The premise is that one night overnight, everyone aged 22+ gets a box with a string that tells them the length of their life. The question is: to know or not to know? To look or not look? The appearance of the strings brings social and political upheaval, new discrimination based on the length of someone’s life, new dating apps, and support groups for “short stringers”.

The writing in this book did a lot more telling than showing. There are a lot of characters, and none of them experienced discrimination based off the length of their string, even though that was a big point in the book. I thought there was tokenism with the one main gay character of color. The author touches on every possible social issue but doesn’t really explore any of them in depth. The characters felt more like caricatures than real people - the evil white male politician, the quirky schoolteacher who doesn’t look at her string, etc.

A book with such an interesting plot could not have been less compelling to me. I didn’t particularly care for any of the characters or storylines. The whole book is just people wondering when they are going to die and fixating on their string length. I was rushing through just to be done with it by the end. I don’t recommend this one. Kinda hated it.