SOURCE: "Last Chance, and a Nasty One," in The New York Times Book Review, November 20, 1994, p. 31.

Sacks is an American educator and critic. In the following review of Borderliners, he praises Høeg's descriptive details but notes problems with the novel's plot and philosophical underpinnings.

At an elite but monstrously repressive prep school outside Copenhagen, circa 1971, the human spirit is affirmed by three teen-agers, a girl and two boys, who band together subversively. All three are orphans, wards of the state, admitted to the school as part of a national scholarship program for the underprivileged. All three are "border-liners," with social or academic problems. If they can graduate, they will move up to university and the hope of a happy future in Denmark's tightly ordered society. If they break the rules or flunk out, they descend to reform school and the abyss. They have one chance left to...