It has a pretty slow start jumping between characters, but as the book progresses I got more invested and excited about where it was going. Coming in not knowing anything about the book was really nice because it headed in a direction I certainly was not expecting, with cool concepts that I liked and didn’t expect from this book. Another thing I found really interesting was how my perspective of the cover changed. I had initially looked at the cover art and thought oh that’s a cool moon coming over a serene landscape, but after reading it I realize that it straight up isn’t a moon at all, which is something really cool how reading the book changes the perspective of how I view an image. I wonder if there’s art that you make assumptions about but once you read the artists statement or something that the entire composition has a different meaning. The ending of the book was also really solid, I was expecting it to end with like a kind of disappointing ending but still wraps everything up nicely leaving a few unanswered questions, but in the final chapters it really ends in a way that I was satisfied with a ton.

Oh wow reading the synopsis on the Goodreads page now I realize I don’t think I would have enjoyed or been nearly as invested in the book if I knew as much as the synopsis gives away. ( )

I struggled to get into this one and almost gave up but I’m glad I stuck it out. The gathering of loose threads was finely done. A good touch of humanity in the characters, too. ( )

Maybe it is just me, but this is not an author that I can read. Along with Colson Whitehead, she is a confusing, meandering writer who seems to enjoy torturing her readers by trying to write a narrative and then letting the reader attempt to connect the dots. As with Station Eleven, I found this uneven, confounding, and totally uninteresting. It is like trying to read a map while the dome light in the car is constantly blinking - you see a few of the roads, but then your get lost all over again. ( )

I wasn't really into the first half at all. I picked this up because I heard it was time travel, and that's some of my favorite sci-fi. This element tied everything together in the end, which was nice, but this really felt like a story about… nothing.

The characters weren't interesting. The one I hated the most (and the one who gets a lot of page-time for some reason) was apparently a version of Mandel herself. The author inserts her personal political beliefs/values into every timeline, as if cultures never change and everyone has just always thought the same way. (On topics like colonization, feminism, liberal politics in general. Half the characters are LGBTQ.) There's a 4-year-old who talks like she's older. And there's profanity, including God's name misused.

Also, there was a focus on pandemics included that I wasn't expecting, and I really didn't care for it. After living through one, I have no desire to spend my fiction reading reliving it.

I'm glad this was short, and there was a calmness to the book that I enjoyed today, in particular, but I don't think this one will stick with me at all.

A note on the formatting: The page numbers were only printed on the right hand pages, and not when those pages started a new chapter, so there were long stretches that just didn't have page numbers at all, and this really drove me nuts. ( )

I listened to this book and just plowed through it in two days. I admit it is on the short side for an audio book but that is not the only reason I was finished so fast. I found reasons to go for long walks and listen to it; I knit and listened to it; I even made supper and listened to it. I had to know how it would all work out.

Mandel wrote this during the COVID-19 lockdown so, perhaps, it is not surprising that a pandemic occurs in this book. There is also time travel which was what I really found fascinating. The book stretches from 1912 to 2401 and a recurring character, obviously a time traveller, pops up in each period. Gaspery-Jacques is from a Moon colony where he discovered his physicist sister, Zoey, was involved with time travel research. Fascinated by an anomaly that has shown up a number of times on earth, Gaspery-Jacques talks himself into a job examining the anomaly. His sister thinks the anomaly is proof of the simulation hypothesis which was the field their mother was exploring. The simulation hypothesis posits that what humans experience is actually a computer simulation with humans as constructs in the simulation. Zoey believes this anomaly is a result of data corruption in the simulation. Perhaps it is but perhaps there is another explanation. Read the book if you want to find out.

This book has some connections with Mandel's previous book, The Glass Hotel, but you don't have to read them in order. It's just interesting for those of us who have to see the connections. ( )