Between the Lines

Between the Lines by Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer

I read this book a few weeks ago, but am just getting around to writing about it (or maybe just putting forth the energy to write about it). Like I've said before, I'm a big Picoult fan. However...this one wasn't anything like her adult books, and I daresay YA isn't her forte. It'd be unfair of me to say it was a read that tweens and teens wouldn't enjoy, but as an adult, I thought it kind of dragged in some areas, and I wasn't really grabbed by the action in the plot. 

Delilah is a teen girl who doesn't particularly care for school, even though she loves to read. The book she's currently infatuated with, Between the Lines, is a fairy tale about a prince on a quest to rescue a princess. It's when the prince begins speaking to Delilah that the story introduces its conflict--how can Delilah rescue a prince from living a repetitive life within the pages of a book?

The number of times Delilah unsuccessfully tries to help the prince escape is what makes this book seem to drag. I thought she could have left out a time or two for the story's sake. It was becoming blatantly obvious that the task was hard. As in most modern fairy tales, there's a happy ending, and readers pretty much know what that ending will be.

Okay, so even though I didn't thoroughly enjoy this book, I can give kudos to the authors for writing a YA novel that is clean. There's no sex, no vulgar language, no inappropriate themes. Despite lacking the topics and language that run amok in today's YA lit, I can say that young girls will enjoy reading this book. It has a happy ending. It has the girl-meets-boy story that infatuates them. It even has color illustrations, which don't come around often in a novel of its length.

So even though I wouldn't recommend it for older readers, if you have a classroom, a library, or a teenage daughter of your own, I'd say it'd be worth it for them to read.

Target age range: 11-15 years