Review of “The List”

I’m a fan of dystopian future books, but this one was just okay. The premise requires a huge suspension of disbelief. The “Melting” was a great start, but what followed did not give me enough to believe that SO MANY PEOPLE would follow one guy who limits what everyone can say, down to a 500 word list. I don’t know about that. At least not for over a decade. I believe this is written to be a middle-grade book, but the end is violently explicit, too much for middle-grade. I’d expect that sort of scene in a YA or adult fiction book, but not middle-grade. The rest of the book reads between middle-grade and YA, so I was shocked when I heard the (very good) narrator read what was only a couple of sentences, but stuck with me as if it were the entire ending. I can’t say that I recommend this book.