In the blink of an eye, life can change; a misunderstanding, a missed opportunity, a misreading.

"The parallelity occurred on a Sunday morning in [Bergen, Norway] in 1998 when Anna was 23 years old, sitting on a terrace reading a book...an incomprehensible rearrangement of letters-perhaps a mysterious higher being had grafted this potential onto the word-a parallel universe would open." A misreading of a word would transport two year old Laura. A vanishing...a child Anna would no longer remember. "...As though the whole universe had wiped something from its memory...left with the vague feeling that something was missing...that there was a logic that had been turned upside down...".

Anna felt shadowed, as if something she loved was no longer there [like] in a piece of music...a tone that slips out of line...the track keeps moving while constantly trying to get back on track." Anna and Laura, both writers and amateur pianists, unaware of each other's existence.

In the alternate universe of "Present Tense Machine" by Gunnhild Oyehaug, the concept of mother and daughter, unaware of each other, was an intriguing premise. The presentation fell short for this reader. The tome was heavily invested in the linguistic aspects of misreading a word and its capacity to change family ties. The story was voiced by a narrator who popped up on occasion, seemingly as an afterthought. The stylistic writing was not this reader's cup of tea. A read for some but not for all.

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

And now time for something beguilingly weird and uncannily strange. A trip down split memory lanes of a family torn by quantum physics. A life split into parallels and followed along as mother and daughter find themselves navigating alternate universes.
This Moebius tape of a novel is difficult to explain or sum up in any other way and it is very much unlike most parallel worlds stories I read. Those tend to veer more into science fiction thriller territory, but this one very much remains a family drama, albeit in a pretty unconventional arrangement.
This kind of book can easily be done wrong, but the author did it just right. Was it the Scandinavian succinctness? The first rate character writing and development? The conceptual originality? The cleverness of it all? The overall brevity? Well, it must have been.
The writing style is usually dense, clumped together, dialogue and all, but somehow it works here. There’s a hypnotic quality to the author’s writing that’s strangely immersive. It’s such a quick read, it goes by like an odd moody slightly surreal dream, all watercolors and ambiance. I don’t think it’ll work for everyone, there’s a very specific tonality to it, but it worked for me. Thanks Netgalley.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This is a rather odd, but playful short novel that asks questions about multiple universes. Anna, a writer and amateur pianist, misreads a word in a poetry book that she’s reading and through this one simple mistake, Laura, her two year old daughter, vanishes. Twenty years later, Laura is pregnant with her first child and Anna is living her life with the two children she’s had since Laura. In this story, neither remembers the other, but they are still so alike and at various times they feel a shadow of the other without quite knowing exactly what they are feeling. A heady book that’s grounded with intelligent and very real characters.

I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. I found the plot intriguing and enjoyed getting to know the characters. I recommend for all fiction lovers.