The book talks about what makes a life worth living, the level of pain you are willing to endure for the sake of yourself and others. It discusses discrimination, change and solidarity in light of the new information that the mysterious strings that showed up on everyone's doorstep brought up.

I enjoyed every charachter and storyline. They showed the individual struggles but also had a connection to the bigger picture.

Julia Whelan is a great audio book narrator!

The Measure begins with an interesting concept: One day, everyone over the age of 21 receives a box containing a string, its length indicating the length of your life. The book itself takes on many of the issues that have always plagued society—racism, discrimination, anti-LGBT, etc—and frames them in a new context. 

However, the story itself gets bogged down by too many perspectives and too many heavy handed attempts at the same message. We get it. Whether your string is long or short, you should live every day like it’s your last. Ultimately the story drags too long as Erlick tries to weave each narrator together. 

This book was incredible. I could not put it down! This book contains many deeper themes that are reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made this book feel very personal for me and almost triggering as I remembered the strife of that global event. So if the pandemic is a hard topic for you still this book might be difficult emotionally because of the parallels. But this book was reflective and meaningful and emotional, and I have no regrets that I went on this journey. Told through multiple POVs that intersect at moments throughout the book, this book made me feel for and love every character. This book was surprisingly human and realistic; I forgot I wasn’t living the string reality they faced. The societal issues related to the divisive nature of the strings were portrayed really well through the lens of the multiple POVs. I loved the discussions on discrimination and prejudice and the ties with both history and current examples of discrimination. This book was beautiful and heartbreaking and gave me a lot to think about my own life and what it would mean to know how long I have to live, or how long my family has. If you need a good cry with some hope, this book is for you.

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.