Book Reviews

Review: Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer

12283261Summary: Delilah is a bit of a loner who prefers spending her time in the school library with her head in a book—one book in particular. Between the Lines may be a fairy tale, but it feels real. Prince Oliver is brave, adventurous, and loving. He really speaks to Delilah.
And then one day Oliver actually speaks to her. Turns out, Oliver is more than a one-dimensional storybook prince. He’s a restless teen who feels trapped by his literary existence and hates that his entire life is predetermined. He’s sure there’s more for him out there in the real world, and Delilah might just be his key to freedom.
A romantic and charming story, this companion novel to Off the Page will make every reader believe in the fantastical power of fairy tales.


My Thoughts:  I’ve read a few Jodi Picoult books, some which I loved and others that I didn’t, so I was open to seeing her take on a YA novel.  I am in love with the concept of this book.  I think it is so creative and smart, and I could not wait to see what they did with it.  Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

First of all, it was definitely a YOUNG adult book- it felt more pre-teen to me than YA.  The writing style and characters felt pretty juvenile.  With such an amazing concept, I was so excited to see the world building in the book within the book, Between the Lines.  I couldn’t wait to see the difference between the story told on the page and what happens when the book is closed, and sadly we didn’t get that much detail and what we did get seemed really cheesy.  Even the love between Delilah and Oliver felt like more of a sweet, crush like relationship, despite their declarations of deep and true love.  It makes sense that it was this way since they were technically characters in children’s fairy tale book, but I think because I was expecting a slightly more mature vibe, I had trouble fully getting on board.  While I enjoyed the plot of trying to get Oliver out of the book, the reasoning behind some of the attempts didn’t fully make sense to me, or it wasn’t explained enough.  The ending was really frustrating.  Without spoiling it, I didn’t think the choice made was fair to all parties involved, but hey, they’re (kind of selfish) teenagers.  Overall, I loved the concept and just wished for more out of it.  It had so much potential, and I think it fell flat.

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