I'm glad I chose the audiobook because, as usual, Julia Whelan is an outstanding narrator. I enjoyed the premise of the mysterious boxes arriving all at once. I loved the theme that measure of one's life is about a life well lived. BUT . . . the book is just so superficial. The sci-fi and dystopian themes were never fully pursued. Character development was never fully pursued. It's just your run-of-the mill commercial fiction book that celebrity book clubs want to sell to us as life-changing, and they are not.

This is such a great book to cultivate discussion for a book club. I am grateful that a friend read it simultaneously so we could discuss it.

Overnight, every adult (over 22) receives a mysterious box on their doorstep. Inside the box is a string and the length of that string represents the number of years you have left to live. The boxes send the world into an overnight frenzy. No one knows where they came from and people are left wondering if they want to know the length of their string. Soon society begins to fraction as people disagree on how to handle this knowledge. Friends and family have to find ways to handle the big questions that come with knowing when your life is going to end.

The book follows 8 individuals as they make their choices to handle this bizarre and unique situation. I enjoyed all of the characters and the various ways they handled the decision about whether or not to look at their string. Each of the 8 individuals has unique circumstances and it allows for the story to show a variety of ways people are impacted.

Eventually, politicians begin to use the strings to "other" the short-string individuals. They begin to question how safe it is to hire a "short-stringer." Media outlets began to publicize stories of short-string owners who hurt themselves or others. Suddenly the owners of short strings become "dangerous." 

This entire storyline reflects how easily we dehumanize the "other" in our society - for whatever reason they are different than us. It shows how quickly and easily we default to this as individuals and as a society. YET, there was hope as well. People begin to band together to fight the dehumanization of the other group. They encourage others to look at every human life as valuable again.

I loved the way this book made me think - about what I would do, about the value of every person, and the importance of every single day. Highly recommend it, especially to read with a friend or in a group.

The opportunity to create a new category of othering arrives overnight for anyone over the age of 22 and prejudices flow amidst the panic.

I wish that there was some closure on some of the (what I consider) plot holes, as well as a couple of characters we grew to know over the 15 years that pass in the book, though I was given enough to be satisfied.  It was a bit predictable and cliche, but I teared up a couple times and definitely cried at the end because thinking about life and death and found family gets me in the feels.