Nikki Erlick is the author of The Measure. It might be considered science fiction or fantasy. She is certainly an able writer. Her prose moves along smoothly and the 352 pages are a quick read.

At first I had some confusion over the identities of the characters, but I soon mastered that. I needed to go back a chapter or two to straighten out who was who.

Initially it was fun. Every adult on Earth magically out of nowhere received a box containing a string. The string represented how long the recipient would live. Inscribed on the box was The measure of your life lies within. Some people opened their boxes and some didn’t. Turns out that the strings within were a true measure of how much time each person had left to live. So much for the concept of free will.

The tale was no longer fun. Events in this bizarre new reality got very dark. As a reader I started to feel somewhat emotionally manipulated. I often feel that way when I see a trite movie. The author wanted me to feel sad about the fate of the short stringed characters, sad about the grief of those left behind. And I did, a bit.

Towards the end, the book turned preachy. Short stringers deserved the same rights as everyone else (the long stringers). Rah, rah!

In summary, this is a first novel by a very talented writer. The creativity of thinking of such an ingenious and involved idea is praiseworthy. I hope Nikki Erlick writes more and better books. I think she can.

Note as to why I chose to write a book report: I had to stop doing my podcast because our marvelous and acclaimed audio engineer died. Over time podcasts became vlogs. They are now video. I find that distracting to the meat of the podcast. Podcasters seem self conscious about being seen.

On ”Shattered Reality Podcast” we primarily interviewed people in the paranormal world who wrote books about UFOs, near death experiences, remote viewing and the like. A couple of months ago I got the idea to write book reports on my blog about such books. The Universe heard me though I had said nothing to anyone about it at the time. I began to get notices about manuscripts and published works. Life interfered and I didn’t get the time to write until now. I hope this won’t be the last report.