Dividing Sky

by Jill Tew

In Jill Tew’s The Dividing Sky, Liv Newman earns a living recording emotional memories and selling them to wealthy clients in a deeply unequal future society. When rookie enforcer Adrian Rao pursues her for violating the rules of that trade, their encounter develops into a dangerous journey and an unexpected romance that challenges what both believe about justice, identity, and freedom.

Big Idea

Who controls our memories—and who profits from our feelings—shapes both personal identity and social power. Tew’s dystopian romance invites students to examine how empathy can challenge systems that teach people to accept inequality.

Discussion Questions

1.Liv sells experiences that wealthy people want to feel. How does this exchange complicate the difference between earning a living and being exploited?
2.How do Liv’s and Adrian’s positions in society influence what each initially considers fair, normal, or necessary? Which encounters challenge those assumptions?
3.How does the threat of losing memories change the stakes of Liv’s choices? Would a person remain the same person without memories of important relationships?
4.Where do Liv and Adrian gain—or lose—the power to make meaningful choices? How does their developing relationship affect those choices?
5.Choose a moment when the novel slows down during a dangerous situation. How does that pause change your understanding of the characters or increase your concern for them?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 55 minutes: excerpt study 10 minutes; discussion 7 minutes; planning 5 minutes; drafting 18 minutes; peer response and revision 10 minutes; sharing and exit ticket 5 minutes.📦 Copies of the novel, two teacher-selected excerpts, paper or writing devices, pencils, highlighters, and a timer. Preview excerpts for violence, coercion, and romantic content; select passages appropriate to the class, particularly in grades 7–8.

Learning Goals

Analyze how pacing choices shape suspense, emotional intimacy, and readers’ judgments.
Use textual evidence to explain how the memory trade reflects the novel’s social inequality.
Write two versions of one event using deliberately contrasting narrative tempos.
Revise narrative writing to make a character’s perspective and emotional stakes clearer.

Activity Steps

1.Read two brief, teacher-selected passages: one involving pursuit or immediate danger and one emphasizing memory, reflection, or connection. Identify specific features that accelerate or slow each passage.
2.Discuss what Liv’s buyers receive from a recorded memory and what a recording might leave out about her circumstances. Ground observations in the selected passages.
3.Invent a short, non-graphic experience Liv might record, such as a moment of wonder or a narrow escape. Plan what a buyer would notice and what Liv would privately understand.
4.Write a 100–150-word buyer-facing version and a 100–150-word private version. Use contrasting pacing choices and label both as imagined extensions of the novel.
5.Exchange drafts. Partners mark one acceleration, one pause, and one detail that reveals inequality or emotional cost; writers revise at least three sentences.
6.Share a short before-and-after example and complete an exit ticket explaining how a pacing decision changed the meaning of the memory.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS.RL.7.3 / RL.9-10.3 / RL.11-12.3 — Analyze interactions among characters, events, and narrative choices; select the standard appropriate to the grade.
ELA: CCSS.RL.7.5 / RL.9-10.5 / RL.11-12.5 — Analyze how structure contributes to meaning, tension, and aesthetic effect.
ELA: CCSS.W.7.3 / W.9-10.3 / W.11-12.3 — Develop narratives using effective techniques, details, and structured event sequences.
ELA: CCSS.W.7.5 / W.9-10.5 / W.11-12.5 — Strengthen writing through planning, revision, and editing.
SEL: Social awareness and ethical decision-making — Consider differing perspectives and evaluate choices within unequal systems.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

The Dividing Sky makes pacing an ethical question as well as a storytelling technique. Liv’s work turns lived experience into something another person can consume, inviting readers to ask which sensations become vivid, which circumstances disappear, and whose time matters. Studying a passage about a recorded memory alongside one about its consequences helps students see that narrative speed controls attention: a writer can hurry past a cost or slow down until readers must confront it. The relationship between Liv and Adrian offers another pacing study. Pursuit and danger create urgency, while conversation, hesitation, and changing judgments give their connection room to develop. Students can trace how external pressure interacts with the slower work of trust, then test those effects in their own writing. In this Pace-Write-Read workshop, students notice a craft choice, try an original version, and read it aloud to evaluate its effect. They should distinguish features they can document in the novel from optional craft experiments inspired by it.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a passage in which Adrian pursues Liv with a quieter moment of connection. Mark how much story time each passage covers and how sentence length, action, and reflection affect its perceived speed.
2. Plot	Map how Liv’s memory-selling work brings her into conflict with Adrian’s enforcement role. Identify the decisions that turn an assignment into a personal and ethical struggle.
3. Prosody	Read a brief exchange between Liv and Adrian aloud, attending to stress, pauses, and changes in tone. Discuss how different readings can emphasize suspicion, vulnerability, or attraction without changing the words.
4. Word	Collect words associated with memories, commerce, and enforcement. Examine how a term can make an experience sound like a personal treasure, a product, or evidence of wrongdoing.
5. Concept	Begin with the novel’s central speculative concept: emotional memories can be recorded and sold. Ask how this invention generates both the plot’s dangers and its questions about who gets access to fulfilling experiences.
6. Voice & Worldview	Compare what Liv and Adrian take for granted about their society. Track how their language and judgments reveal the difference between surviving under a system and enforcing it.
7. Point of View	Track the novel’s alternating focus on Liv and Adrian, noting what each knows, misunderstands, or withholds. Discuss how access to both perspectives complicates a simple fugitive-versus-enforcer story.
8. Setting & Place	Examine how the city’s unequal living conditions shape Liv’s opportunities and Adrian’s assumptions. Notice when movement through a place also exposes a boundary of wealth, safety, or freedom.
9. Original Characters	Identify traits that make Liv more than a resourceful fugitive and Adrian more than an agent of authority. Support each observation with a particular desire, contradiction, or choice.
10. Dialogue	Annotate an exchange in which Liv and Adrian want different things. Notice whether short replies accelerate conflict and whether questions, evasions, or pauses delay trust.
11. Details	Choose a small detail that reveals Liv’s material circumstances or the workings of memory commerce. Explain how it communicates social information without stopping the story for a full explanation.
12. Descriptions	Study how sensory description makes an experience feel desirable, unsettling, or emotionally valuable. Ask which details would attract a memory buyer and which reveal the experience’s cost to Liv.
13. Firsts	Revisit Liv and Adrian’s first encounter and compare it with a later interaction. Track how initial labels and expectations establish tension that subsequent experiences complicate.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Find a moment when Liv faces an immediate consequence rather than a distant possibility. Identify the concrete goal, obstacle, and potential loss that pull readers into the moment.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Distinguish fully dramatized encounters from passages that compress background or elapsed time. Discuss why a change in Liv and Adrian’s relationship may need a scene rather than a summary.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate suspense about whether Liv will evade punishment from tension about whether Adrian will reconsider his duties. Find a passage where those two uncertainties reinforce each other.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Distinguish an ordinary recollection or recorded memory from a structural flashback, and identify any chapter ending that leaves a consequence unresolved. Treat flash-forward as a comparison tool unless students locate a clear example in the text.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect several chapter endings and openings for delayed answers, changes in perspective, or emotional reversals. Explain how a break can make readers wait for information about Liv or Adrian.
19. Pace & Creativity	Rewrite a brief, original Liv-inspired memory with either twice as much or half as much narrative space. Compare what becomes possible when a writer expands perception or compresses action.
20. Play	Create two harmless imaginary memory products for the novel’s marketplace, then question whose experience each product simplifies. Use the invention to explore the difference between playful worldbuilding and the serious economics beneath it.
21. Performance	Perform a short Liv–Adrian exchange twice: once rapidly and once with deliberate hesitation. Discuss which delivery best fits the textual evidence about power and trust.
22. Personality	Track how Liv and Adrian respond differently to the same pressure. Ask how their characteristic reactions determine whether a scene becomes confrontational, reflective, or intimate.
23. Humor	Look for teasing, irony, or a lighter exchange amid the danger surrounding Liv and Adrian. If present in the selected passage, discuss whether humor offers relief, conceals fear, or tests closeness.
24. Pause	Find a hesitation before a consequential choice or response. Explain how the pause gives weight to a decision even when little external action occurs.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Collect a comparison or sensory image from a passage about memory or attraction. Explain how figurative language stretches a brief feeling into an experience readers can dwell within.
26. Repetition	Track recurring references to memory, feeling, freedom, or obligation. Distinguish repeated ideas from repeated wording, and explain how their meanings change as Liv and Adrian change.
27. Rhythm	Compare the sentence patterns in an urgent scene and a reflective one. Read both aloud to test how clauses, sentence lengths, and paragraph lengths create different rhythms.
28. Punctuation	Examine punctuation in a tense conversation or action passage, using only marks actually present in the excerpt. Explain how sentence boundaries and interruptions control the reader’s breathing and attention.
29. Questions	List the questions readers have about Liv’s fate, Adrian’s loyalty, and the memory trade at a chosen stopping point. Sort them into immediate plot questions and larger ethical questions.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare what a wealthy buyer gains from Liv’s recorded experience with what Liv risks to obtain it. Then examine how the novel gives different amounts of narrative attention to pleasure, labor, and consequence.
31. Objects	Study the technology that makes recording and trading memories possible. Track how its meaning changes when viewed as a tool for income, a means of control, or a threat to identity.
32. Threes	Choose three encounters that show a shift in Liv and Adrian’s trust, then arrange them as expectation, complication, and change. Present this as an analytical framework, not a claim that Tew consistently structures scenes in threes.
33. Lists	Create contrasting lists of what Liv needs and what her buyers desire, using evidence from the novel. As a writing experiment, turn one list into a sentence and test whether accumulation speeds the delivery or emphasizes the burden.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Inspect paragraph breaks and any section breaks in the edition being used. Discuss how a visual pause around a realization can give readers time to register its consequences for Liv or Adrian.
35. Art & Graphics	Analyze the cover of the available edition as a publisher’s visual interpretation of the novel, not as evidence of interior illustration. Ask what its imagery or typography suggests about division, intimacy, and danger.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Create an optional decision map for a dilemma facing Liv or Adrian, recording each choice’s likely benefits and costs. Clarify that this is a classroom adaptation rather than an interactive feature of the novel.
37. Placement	Identify where information about a memory, a motive, or an enforcement consequence is revealed. Ask how learning it earlier or later would change readers’ sympathy and suspense.
38. Form	Explore how the novel combines dystopian speculative fiction with romance. Track how systemic danger and emotional connection require different kinds of scenes yet raise the stakes for each other.
39. Dummy	Adapt the picture-book planning term into a six-panel prose storyboard of an original Liv-inspired memory scene. Assign narrative space to action, sensation, and reflection before drafting, rather than suggesting the novel uses picture-book form.
40. Passion	Identify what Liv and Adrian care about strongly enough to risk something for it. Connect that commitment to pacing: when does desire propel immediate action, and when does it make a character stop and reconsider?

Pace-Write It!

20-minute task: Memory for Sale, Meaning Not Included. Minutes 0–3: Read a short, teacher-selected passage involving Liv’s memory work; identify one sensory detail and one pacing choice. Minutes 3–5: Imagine a non-graphic, canon-compatible experience she might record, such as a startling moment of beauty during danger, and identify what a buyer would miss about its context. Minutes 5–11: Write two original versions of that same instant, approximately 60–80 words each: a fast, sensation-centered version for a buyer and a slower private version that reveals Liv’s risk, need, or conflicting feelings. Label both as invented extensions. Minutes 11–15: Partners read the versions aloud and underline the exact words or sentence boundaries that alter the pace. Minutes 15–18: Revise one version so that its tempo more clearly supports its emotional purpose. Minutes 18–20: Share one revised sentence and answer: How did changing the pace change whose experience the reader understood?

Classroom Activities

One Memory, Two Tempos

Students imagine a memory Liv could record, then write it twice: first as an experience designed to appeal to a wealthy buyer, and then as Liv’s private account of what the experience actually costs her. By changing sentence length, sensory detail, dialogue, and pauses, students explore how pacing can reveal the difference between a marketable feeling and a lived experience. All invented passages are labeled as original extensions, not quotations from the novel.

Create a free account to reveal this guide

Your free account includes one complete guide download — the full teacher’s guide, discussion questions, classroom activities, and the Pace-Write-Read writing workshop.

Create Free Account Sign in

Discussion questions PWR workshop PDF download