I would love you in any shape, in any world, with any past. Never doubt that.

It’s one part jumping into parallel reality sci-fi, one part murder mystery, and one part YA adventure story (complete with love tangle).

For me at least, it works surprisingly well. I’m normally not a huge fan of love tangles taking up a large part of a story. Here, I think it works pretty well. We have the additional tension of investigating murder. Plus having the feel of previously established relationships and growth throughout the story. It works.

Parallel reality / sci-fi wise, it’s… light. There’s not really much in the way of exactly how parallel realities work and what the rules are for moving from one to another. On the other hand, as a vehicle to jump from our world (ish) to a vaguely futuristic London. To one where Russian is still in it’s full Czarist grandeur. To another where climate change has already flooded the world.

It’s also interesting how on one hand you have the parallel reality ’everything is possible’, contrasted throughout the entire book by:

“There are patterns within the dimensions,” Paul insisted, never looking up again. “Mathematical parallels. It’s plausible to hypothesize that these patterns will be reflected in events and people in each dimension. That people who have met in one quantum reality will be likely to meet in another. Certain things that happen will happen over and over, in different ways, but more often than you could explain by chance alone.”

“In other words,” I said, “you’re trying to prove the existence of fate.”

I was joking, but Paul nodded slowly, like I’d said something intelligent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”

I feel like you can’t really have it both ways… and the story doesn’t really either. It’s really just the latter.

Overall, I really enjoyed listening to this story. I’m really curious where it goes from here. There’s certainly room for the sequels, let’s see what they do!

Minor spoilers:

One thing that really bothers me about this book (and if they explained it, I missed it), is what exactly happens to the original that jumps out of a reality/why.

When you jump into a new reality, your mind basically takes over that universes version of you. And if you jump again, your mind jumps again. So … what happens to your original body? It doesn’t get a swapped mind from the new reality (that would have been a neat twist). And it doesn’t just… sit there, or we would have dealt with that. So… what happens to it?

At some level, I get that that’s just not the point of this story. The author don’t want to have to deal with that, so the story just ignores it.

But for whatever reason, it bothers me.

So it goes. 😄