I started off enjoying this book. It was a quick read, and hard to put down. There were some weird science things that the author made a decent attempt to seem plausible. Nothing stood out as too absurd to exist at least in the realm of fiction.
The main thing I didn't like about the book overall is that it seemed to be very much written by a man. It was a subtle thing, but not being a man there were quite a few moments where I thought it was odd how something was said or described. On a second thought it seemed less odd, just different.
I'm always a little hesitant to pick up a fiction book I haven't read great things about. I don't like getting all wrapped up in a book and then have the ending just go pffft. I read a few reviews, which claimed this book had a sappy ending. I thought that would be fine, I don't mind sappy. In my opinion the ending was dumb. It took all the momentum of the story and just killed it.
This book is about dimensional travel. The idea is that any choice you make you actually made all the choices, and there are infinite realities with all the outcomes of everyone's choices. The book starts with Jason, a happy average man with a family and mediocre job. He is taken hostage and thrown into another world where he didn't get married and have a child, instead he became a famous scientist who invented the dimension travel. The guy who took him hostage was actually the version of himself from that world, who regretted leaving the women Jason married.
The whole book is Jason escaping the world where Jason2 stuck him, trying to get home to his family. The machine to travel in throws him into all these horrible places where he almost dies multiple times. He finally figures out how to use it and finds world's closer and closer to his own, almost going crazy in the process.
When he finally does get to his world there are apparently there are many copies of himself who also found this exact world, and all these copies are trying to kill each other. This is where I think the book stops making as much sense. It makes sense that there are copies of the first Jason, but why do they all end up in the same exact world at the end? Jason was gone for weeks trying to find it, there must be an infinite number of worlds that started as the one he left. That world had millions of people making millions of choices for weeks, there must be a nearly infinite number of worlds that all the versions of Jason's could have ended up in. And then there is the issue of why are they all trying to kill each other? None of them are trying to kill Jason2 for taking their family, they are all attacking each other. It makes very little sense.
Then the worst part one of the Jason, presumably the one we have been following the whole book, gets to his family, and they decide the only way to escape is to all jump in the machine together and try their luck in whatever world they end up in. That plan didn't work so well the first few times Jason went into it. The machine is controlled by your thoughts and emotions, so somehow his wife and teenage son are able to control the machine their first time in it, after being through a very traumatic few days. This ending makes no sense. Maybe the author is leaving it open to a sequel?
I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for this Review.
