As a young child, I went through a phase of being heavily addicted to those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I loved the concept of different choices resulting in different outcomes. Sometimes it worked; all too often it didn’t, but I loved the idea that you could get varying outcomes depending on what you did. So, you can imagine how excited I was when I spotted this while browsing one day. I’m not sure Waterstones were doing it any favours by describing it as a literary ‘Sliding Doors’ (unless they’re subconsciously trying to appeal to Gwyneth Paltrow fans) but the whimsical notion of following someone through three different versions of their life was intriguing.
When Eva and Jim first meet, they are nineteen year old students at Cambridge in the late 1950s. Jim is walking along a lane when a woman approaching him on a bike swerves to avoid a dog. What happens next depends on which thread of the story you are reading.
Following the three separate threads was, I feared, going to prove something of a stumbling block but this couldn’t have been further from the truth. None of the strands quite worked out as I’d have liked, but I was fascinated by the varying stories. I loved the way little details reoccured within strands, each time slightly different. Barnett’s writing style was confident and controlled, capably guiding us through the different permutations of the stories.
I’ve recommended this to so many people already, and would love to see this adapted (as long as they didn’t put Gwyneth Paltrow in it!)
I was looking for something a bit different, and I think I found it here.