Helpful Score: 2
A captivating book about childhood and education, through the eyes of a child who is considered "borderline" because he doesn't fit into the usual boxes. One of my all-time favorites.
Helpful Score: 2
a very interesting take on another book "Replay"... this also had some orwell 1984 type themes... i like hoeg's writing... detailed, but not too revealing... layering... much like his work with smila's sense of snow...
Helpful Score: 2
Borderliners is one of my favorite books. Peter Hoeg is extraordinarily gifted at creating characters that you become emotionally invested in. The book's central theme is "time" and within the story, you go back and forth between the main character as an adult and his time as a child in an experimental orphanage of sorts. The book is full of the observations about time as seen through the eyes of several children and the pain and horror they experience in their "home". This is a beautiful, tragic, hopeful, frightening look at life and the ebb and flow of time. How time changes us and we, in effect, can alter time. The prose flows across the pages, and will become a part of you. I read this one at least once a year. It is truly beautiful.
Great approach to the troubled juvenile genre.
Interesting and mysterious, but not as good as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.
Students in an elite private school in Copenhagen discover that the school is using them in an experiment to control children--an experiment that, almost inevitably, has tragic consequences. A disturbing book from the author of Smilla's Sense of Snow.
I think Hoeg is a very talented writer, but this book didn't quite come together for him. Parts of the book, especially when Peter was creeping around the school at night to save his friend August, were tense in a beautifully quiet way and I was moved. Other parts were very abstract discussions on the nature of time, and while those could have balanced the immediate tension of children trying daily to survive in a totalitarian boarding school, they were too abstruse for me. In the end, I never did figure out the plot. I skimmed over the last few chapters.
My expectations for this book were high because of how much I liked The Woman and the Ape. I'd try Hoeg again, but I wouldn't recommend this book.
My expectations for this book were high because of how much I liked The Woman and the Ape. I'd try Hoeg again, but I wouldn't recommend this book.
Another very enjoyable book by the author of Smilla's Sense of Snow.
