“We're all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglass.”

A harsh reality of life, but a reality nonetheless, is the fact that the strings that hold together our day to day comfort are more fragile than we think they are.If there's a book that can make you be grateful for the little things in life, like the way the birds chirp outside your window in the morning, the aroma of morning coffee you're drinking while you hear the water running while your wife is taking a shower, and the bored look your son gives you when you crack one of your "lame dad jokes", it's this one. Seriously, this book anchors you in that cozy routine from the very first chapter, exploring Jason Dessen's ordinarily peaceful life with his wife Daniela and their son Charlie, before  violently stripping you away from it, when Jason is kidnapped by a masked figure, taken somewhere remote, while being forced to drive away from the comfort of his life, from everything he loved and hated at the same time, and injected with a strange substance that knocks him out completely. Jason wakes up from that stupor, to a whole new world, where Daniela isn't his wife, where Charlie doesn't exist, and where he's a high profile figure who went missing for 8 months and is now being welcomed back as a hero.

This is one of those books that are absolutely hard to put down. It's a SF work that is beautifully accessible to all readers, containing just the right amount of theory and reflection to give it its rightful spot within the genre, and just the right amount of plot and suspense to make it a riveting thrill to get through.The more the chapters progress, the more wonderfully absurdthe plot becomes. The subject matter deals with the multiverse theory, and the millions of parallel realities that exist alongside ours, triggered by all the little choices we make by the minute. Each choice made makes the universe branch out into the infinite other possibilities that could have been if that choice wasn't taken. Just think about it, there are versions of you who never broke up with your ex, versions of you who decided to drop out of school and join an illegal drug dealing business, versions of you that never survived past the age of 2.This book expertly explores the insanity of the implications of this theory, and keeps taking it up a notch, chapter by chapter.

The main mystery was one I was able to guess quite soon, and I'm very happy that the author respected the intelligence of the reader and gave us the truth of what happened quite early on.I worried that once the mystery was revealed, the book would descend in quality, but that wasn't the case. The thrill and excitement were there until the very last chapter. I would definitely want to see a movie version of this, or perhaps a Netflix series. I could vividly picture the environments the author was describing, and was as tense and as terrified as Jason when the whole world was crumbling around him (quite literally, I must add). It was a fun, exciting, thrilling, intellectually stimulating and emotional readand I recommend everyone, even those who aren't a fan of SF, to read this very accessible work that belongs to this genre.


 “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.”