After my last few books, I wanted to read a mystery. A nice amouse bouche, a pallete cleanser for my literary pallete. And boy this did not disappoint.
The basic premise of this book is, we are following the MC, as they experience the day through the lens of 7 (+0.5) different people. There is no trick to it. It is, for a lack of a better word, magic. He lives the other people’s life via magic.
The two twists are as follows. 1, the MC experiences the day not in chronological order. As in, the first body he lives through, he lives in later chronologically than some of the others.
2, there are others doing the same thing, but with one body.
both of these things, plus the premise, lead to a very very fun book. It has all the good tropes of time travel, with his later bodies passing information to his earlier bodies, or later bodies seeing his earlier lives repeat actions through a different lens.
One of the other really nice things is, the author embraces ‘don’t over explain things’. They don’t need to explain *how* someone lives other lives repeatedly, you just have to accept it happens, and therefore… which really lets you focus on the mystery part of it.
Speaking of, the mystery is also really well developed and told. The interconnected pieces of the story fit together really well, with no big plot holes. There are some pretty big hints that happen in the midde, that the MC never has a moment of realization for, but that isn’t a huge deal.
Overall this was definitely one of the better books I’ve read this year. Really had me thinking of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which is one of my all time favorite books.
