Published: July 2016
Pages: 342
Series: Standalone
Summary
Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.
“Are you happy with your life?”
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
Is it this world or the other that’s the dream?
My thoughts
I think this may be a quick one, I’m sorry, the premise was totally up my street but the execution wasn’t there.
“No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.”
The story line totally gripped me. Kidnapped and pushed into a situation where Jason is questioning his reality as well as his sanity. What is going on? Which life is his ‘real’ life and just what has he caught himself in? And for the first quarter of this book I was glued to the pages. Looking for clues, my heart racing as the story unfolds. I was so confused and intrigued, I needed to know what was happening and I was trying to figure it out.
That’s where my enjoyment ended I’m afraid. The reveal – if we can even call it that – was done very offhanded and quietly. It was snuck into a passage, no drama. Jason just suddenly realised what was happening all on his own without giving us even a smidge of insight. I have no idea how he drew certain conclusions and I’ll never find out. The author doesn’t tell us. The reveal was so minimal that it didn’t impact me the way it should have. This man was taken from his family, I should be shaken when we finally see what unfolded.
“We’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
The secondhalf of this book is so much worse. It is painfully slow. And I love a slow burn. I love a character driven story but this is something else entirely. There is very little plot and it’s written in a repetitive format where we get the same scenario over and over again. The writing isn’t the strongest so I never got the emotional impact (and you guys know, I am easily emotional with books, it’s not hard to make me feel something) and I felt nothing!
Perhaps the author wasn’t sure how to wrap everything up, perhaps I’m all cried out, I’m not sure but I left this book feeling severely underwhelmed (there was a LOT of hype over this one) and it went straight up on my Vinted once I was finished.
“We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.”
Would I recommend?
Maybe, if you’re new to sci-fi, there is definitely a space for this book. It could be a nice introduction to this genre but otherwise, I found it to lose its way quite quickly, it slowed the pace right down and was incredibly anti-climatic and rather boring. I wanted to love it, the summary was speaking to me at the bookshop but it failed to hit the mark for me.
Out of all the books of his I have read, this one is my favorite. It’s one of those books that you do have to try to wrap your head around the progression of events.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I did understand what happened and why, I just found the pacing and the writing to make it a bit underwhelming for me. I’m still open to reading more of his work, perhaps its just this one that didn’t work me.
So glad to hear this! I think I will pass on it.