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gneissisnice
Since: Apr, 2010
24th Jun, 2012 04:02:38 PM
That's definitely Running Out Of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, I'm 100% sure.
Koraki
Since: Sep, 2011
24th Jun, 2012 07:12:21 PM
Thanks! That's it, all right.
I read this book several years ago, and after a few months forgot all about it until recently. Now I'm wracking my brains, trying to figure out what the book was called. It was youth fiction, and I think it wasn't published before the 90s. It wasn't very long - it was probably under 200 pages.
The setting was a Past Right Now community in the United States that had been deliberately re-created by a group of people - I'm not sure who, but I believe it was the government, though it may have been some large company. The time period in which the community was living was somewhere around the late 18th century or early-to-mid 19th century, while the real time period was in the 90s or 2000s. I also seem to recall that the creation of this community may have had something to do with health or medical reasons, although the community was fairly small. For some reason that I can't remember, there were also cameras and viewing windows hidden in different places all over the town, such as in the shops. I think that while the children in this community didn't know that it was a re-creation, their parents did, but intentionally kept it a secret from them. The main character was a girl in her early teens. She might have had a brother, or a friend who was a boy. I don't recall what her parents did for a living, but at some point in the book, the girl's mother tells her about the outside world.
Around the same time that she learns about this from her mother - or maybe some time before - the town in which the girl lives begins to experience unrest and disagreements related to the fact that they're being kept in this community and aren't supposed to let the younger generation know that it's a re-creation of life several hundred years ago. The girl ends up running away from the community and escapes from it. During her escape, I think she runs through a forest at night, and somehow winds up looking through the aforementioned viewing windows at someone she knows working in their shop. After she escapes from the general area of the community, I distinctly recall that she uses a telephone (I believe it's a pay telephone) to call someone. Near the end of the book, citizens of a town near the community hold a protest on the steps of the town hall and the girl is interviewed by a reporter.
It would be great if someone could find out what this book is called - it's been bothering me for a while now. I'd really like to locate it and re-read it, and also add an example for it under Past Right Now, since that page was what sparked my memory of the book in the first place.