Between the Lines

About Between the Lines

Prince Oliver has been trapped inside the same fairy tale for as long as he can remember. Every time the book is opened, he and the other characters perform their roles—the princess, the sidekick, the sea creatures, the villains—and when it closes, they exist in the spaces between the printed words, living their own lives invisible to any reader. Oliver wants out. He wants to know what lies outside the book's margins, beyond the story he was written into. When a fifteen-year-old girl named Delilah starts reading the book obsessively—returning to it again and again—Oliver discovers he can communicate with her. And she can hear him.

Published by Simon & Schuster in 2012, Between the Lines is a collaboration between Jodi Picoult and her daughter Samantha van Leer, who proposed the original concept as a teenager. The result is a dual coming-of-age story: Oliver's, in which the character who wants to escape his assigned story must find a way to become something he wasn't written to be; and Delilah's, in which a girl who has been using fiction as a refuge from a social world she finds hostile must decide to invest in the actual one.

The novel-within-the-novel—the fairy tale itself—is presented with its own internal logic and geography, and the story-world characters have rich lives that they hide from every reader. These sections have the warmth of classic fairy tale pastiche, rendered with affection for the genre rather than distance from it.

A Story About Stories

The novel thinks seriously about what it means to love a book too much—to prefer a fictional world to the real one, to form a stronger attachment to a character than to any actual person in your life. Delilah's situation is not mocked or pathologized; it is recognized as something real. The novel's argument is not that fiction is dangerous but that it should be a doorway rather than a destination.

Oliver's perspective offers the complement: what would it mean to be inside a story and want to leave it? His desire for agency—for the ability to make choices that aren't written for him—is the novel's philosophical engine, and it is handled with more seriousness than the premise might suggest.

Why Between the Lines Has Been Challenged

Between the Lines has been challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog. The challenges most often cite mild language and the novel's portrayal of a teenager who is socially withdrawn and deeply attached to a fictional world—a dynamic that some objectors feel the book validates rather than corrects. The book does not present Delilah's withdrawal as healthy; it presents it as a recognizable human response that she eventually grows beyond. That arc is the novel's entire point.