I really enjoyed the sci-fi elements to this book, it had everything that I was looking for from this type of book. The characters were everything that I was hoping for and enjoyed the concept of them with the story. Laura Paquette writes a strong story and interesting characters and I’m glad I got to read this.

I initially DNF’d this book as an ARC because the eARC document was basically unreadable. The file must have gotten corrupted somehow. I borrowed it from KU after it was published and had a much better time reading it.

It took me a few chapters to really get into this book, but once I got into it I really enjoyed it. This book mixed moments of funny, witty banter with deep and thoughtful dialogue in a way that really helps you connect with the main character. This book makes you question how much of who you are is because of your past memories/experiences and how much is just inherently a part of you? Are you still you without your memories, without your past? I’m excited to read what happens in the sequel.

I enjoyed the idea of this book but sadly I've had to dnf at 18% as I've never really been able to get into the book

Loved the concept of this book and I am sure it will have its audience however I just couldn’t connect to the characters and the writing styles just wasn’t for me. I DNF’d about 30% ish

It was a hard experience for me to reading this book so i dnf it. I forced myself to at least read the 30% of the book, but it didn't work out for me, and i can't feel attached to the plot, the setting, the characters and im sorry.

Thanks Netgalley for giving me and advance reader copy.

This is going to be a really tough book to review – I wanted very desperately to like this book, however found myself ultimately thwarted.

First issue is simply a matter of ‘Too much’. Our MC has memory loss, a probation officer implanted in their head, a complex sci-fi political landscape (spacescape?)– which was already a lot, and then Time Travel? Multi-Verses? I’ll come back to this again, but the sheer amount of things going on, particularly things that potentially confuse the narrative, (e.g. the MC having memory gaps and a voice in her head), I’m not saying that it would be impossible to pull off a good story with this amount of baggage – its just unfortunate this book doesn’t.

I think the problem comes with lack of grounding in the prose. A lot of the words on each page were dialogue or stream of consciousness / internal voice. This created a really weird effect – kind of like talking heads syndrome, except that when something DID happen it was often really jarring and noticeable, like “holy sh*t someone just got their leg cut off!” or “that person just got disintegrated by a “doctube” (still not entirely clear what a doctube is, was it like a hyperfast uber gondola??). It wasn’t always ultra violence, there were actually some VERY cool spaceship battle scenes, but they were few and far between when this book desperately needed more.

Or rather just more scenes where concrete things were happening. After a chaotic first few scenes it seemed like a massive chunk of this book were characters talking about things, but not actually showing many of these happening. I got the feeling that the intention was to create a sort of emotional whiplash that war can create where you don’t witness much of the atrocity firsthand, but I also wonder if it was just that hard to keep track of who was doing what that it created a sense of being disconnected from the story (again not helped that one character was a voice in another character’s head).

Which coming back to the first point, having a head-hopping, universe AND time hopping narrative was just all too much to keep track of. I genuinely had to flick back and double check I hadn’t misread that indeed time-travel was happening in this story too. The final quarter of the book was much more grounded and really did have a good pacing – but it was held back by having a lack of foundation – it was an interesting lesson in writing how books need: not only clear stakes but also clear choices for the MCs. When it came down to the final confrontation it felt stilted because I honestly didn’t know what the characters were capable of, can they time travel or multi-verse travel or both, or neither?
Then there are a couple of inexplicable decisions about the story. The tone is somewhat all over the shop, the jokes are genuinely funny as are the quips but they feel out of place against the rest of the story, there is even a moment where the MC asks themselves “what’s wrong with me” when they find humour in a corpse, and the line just felt a bit too self referential, like the character was aware they were a novel character or something. The epilogue abruptly has some of the best grounding and vivid setting description of the whole darn book, and its like why is this great material left till the end!?

It's tough, because the premise and ideas in this book are amazing, the potential in the story is huge but it feels like it needed a major editorial sweep or two.