Thank you to NetGalley and publishers, Skipstone, for granting me access to a most puzzling read that had me scratching my head in equal confusion and wonder.
Having finished, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve grasped some of the finer points of the concept. I found myself reading, then having to pause to actually digest what I’d read and try to work it out/link to what I already knew. I would liken reading this to me trying to solve a Rubik’s cube…I know there’s a knack to it whereby everything flows seamlessly, but I work in fits and starts without really getting anywhere, then by a freak occurrence something will slot into place and it’s done.
When I started reading I wondered what was true and what was in our character Laney’s imagination. She writes stories about alternate universes where different characters sharing her name experience different things. She interacts with people who reference events she thought were dreams which seem to have really taken place. Piece by piece she starts to realise some of these events are merging. This idea of alternate universes and time frames may make more sense to students of maths or physics.
The story as such is not a pleasant one. Laney reads a story about two skeletons found in the woods, dated to a time that she recalls finding her father having sex with an old girlfriend. She is fascinated by what she recalls of that incident and is convinced that the skeletons are the bodies of her and her twin sister (a twin who doesn’t exist in the story we start) who were killed by a sadistic pair of brothers – one of whom is friends with her now. The Laney we follow is switching experiences/times in order to hunt the person who in another time/place killed her and tortured then killed her sister.
For every choice there’s a range of possibilities. Watching Laney try to manipulate her experiences was intriguing. I confess to not always following Laney’s thought process, and the book seemed to give some conflicting messages about addiction and sexuality, but as a whole it was a read I’d recommend.