My review on GR:
3 stars feels a bit harsh but 4 feels like too many so this felt like a 3.5-star read for me. the premise is really interesting and very conducive to self-reflection, especially since the sort-of post-grad phase i’m currently in feels very close to what i imagine nora felt like in between choosing her different books/lives. the thing that i’ll be thinking about the most after reading this, though, is the distinction between our life events that could have turned out differently if we’d made different choices vs. the life events that were ‘bound to’ happen regardless of our choice/actions. while i enjoyed the premise/plot, i just don’t think haig is a great writer… like, he had an interesting idea but the book isn’t very well-written. even if i don’t think a book is super well-written overall, i normally find at least a few sentences worth underlining/highlighting, but not in this one… some parts felt very ted talk-y/tumblr self-help-y/motivational speaker at school assembly-esque, you get the idea. i think that’s partially why haig wrote this book, given his history and mental health advocacy, but i wish this had been done in a less in-your-face way that felt too simple/cliché at times. with that said though i’ve recommended this to my parents and would still recommend this to others as well!
Somebody on GR called this book a ‘self-help’ disguised as fiction, and honestly that’s pretty accurate.
There’s one moment in the book when Nora asks Mrs. Elm if there’s a life where her cat didn’t die and she says no, Nora was a great cat owner and there was nothing she could have done to prevent her cat from dying somewhat prematurely. Obviously this made me think about Changyun… I don’t think that there was anything that I could have done better/differently to change anything — in other words, I don’t particularly have any strong regrets about what I did or didn’t do because I think that I did the best I could with what I could have known. I feel weirdly lucky and relieved that that’s how I feel right now, and I feel heartbroken that that’s not necessarily how my parents feel, and I feel worried that this might change as I grow older. Sure, if I’d known what I know now, I would have done something — call him, make my mom go pick him up early, make him not go to school that day, whatever. I recommended this book to my parents hoping that what Mrs. Elm said to Nora about the cat helps them feel better but we’ll see…
