Book review - Falling Out of TIme

 

Title: Falling Out of Time

Author: Margaret Peterson Haddix

Genre: dystopia

Similar books: The Town With No Mirrors by Christina Collins

                      The List by Patricia Fforde

Rating:

 

a bit of a let down

Summary (provided by publisher): Twelve-year-old Zola thinks she has the perfect life. She thinks everyone does, now that it’s 2193, and humanity has solved all its problems. Insta-Closets deliver new clothes every morning, Insta-Ovens deliver gourmet meals on demand, and virtual reality goggles let her have any adventure she wants, with friends from all over the world.
Then one day Zola finds a handwritten note in her Insta-Closet:
If you want to see things as they really are, come find me.
What if Zola’s wrong about everything—even the year? As she struggles to figure out who wrote the note, she discovers a printed book in her Insta-Closet called The Jessie Keyser Story: How One Girl Escaped from Clifton Village. Zola wonders: Who is Jessie Keyser, and why does she look like her . . . and what else do they have in common?

My opinion: I feel like I should preface this by saying that I read Running Out of Time when it was still fairly new and I was a young teen. I loved the book and it made Haddix one of my "must read" authors for several years. But that's been a couple of decades and I haven't read it since. So maybe this book is suffering for me in comparison with an idealized memory. That being said, most of my criticisms remain. My biggest complaint is that this book didn't feel necessary. I do understand the desire to revisit the world of a book, especially taking into account how attitudes have shifted in the intervening years. You want to explore how new issues and ideas would influence the culture of the book. The problem for me is that this book basically follows the same plot as the first one. While the details are different, the thrust of the plot remains essentially the same. Additionally, the villain lacks focus and proper motivation. There are seeds for a more complex exploration of class structure, grief, and responsibility but they don't get much beyond introduction.

Advanced Reader Copy provided by NetGalley