Recursion By Blake Crouch

[drawkcabi]

From Amazon:

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Dark Matter and the Wayward Pines trilogy comes a relentless thriller about time, identity, and memory—his most ambitious, mind-boggling, irresistible work to date, and the inspiration for Shondaland’s upcoming Netflix film.

From Deadline.com:

https://deadline.com/2018/10/netflix-movie-tv-series-shonda-rhimes-matt-reeves-blake-crouch-novel-recursion-1202476097/

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Netflix has landed the rights to Blake Crouch’s upcoming novel Recursion for Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beer’s Shondaland and Matt Reeves’ 6th & Idaho which they will develop as a feature film as well as a television universe. Recursion will hit book shelves from Crown on June 11, 2019.

 

My take:

This book is totally awesome. I mean I was literally awed reading this! It's got 4 and 1/2 stars on Amazon and I'd say it deserves it.

If you like books like Replay by Ken Grimwood, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, The Middle Falls Series by Shawn Inmon, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, as well as other works by Blake Crouch (I've never read his Wayward Pines trilogy but I did read his book Dark Matter and I strongly recommend that one as well) then this book is for you.

My opinion is, if you like any of those other books, just jump in and start reading and you'll enjoy it best that way.

However, if you need a little more, I'll put this in spoiler tags but they are not really spoilers except in explaining a bit of the book's plot mechanics:

Spoiler

Imagine someone builds a device that can map someone's memory, one that sticks out enough that it's really clear, and then transport them back in time to when they were making that memory. Kind of like Quantum Leap but only when Sam would leap into himself. So you go back in time to that memory and you start a new timeline where no one but you realizes things are happening differently except maybe some vague but strong feelings of déjà vu at certain times. However, here's the real kicker, once you've progressed forward into that new timeline to the exact date and time when you originally used the memory device, EVERYONE all of a sudden remembers the original timeline, memories like those get dubbed "dead memories". So if someone has a child and something you did prevented that child from ever being born, a moment will come when the parents are struck by a spell and then their memory goes from being oblivious about their child in the other timeline to remembering everything about him or her, only they are not there anymore. That's just one example. The havoc this causes is catastrophic. It starts out as an oddity some people are experiencing and gets named FMS or False Memory Syndrome. Doctors and scientists are perplexed, they consider all explanations, a pathogen causing this, spacial fluctuations from black holes or similar phenomena, maybe the YouTube crazies are actually on to something for once with the Mandela Effect? It just gets worse from there though and Crouch has a way with taking things to their worst case scenarios, there were moments when  was reading this I realized I was holding my breath because of what the characters were going through.

 

So as a lover of time travel tales, this one gets my highest recommendation.

[Winterfella]

Just finished reading this a few days ago.  I really liked it too.  I thought it got more convoluted, understandably, in the latter half, to the point where you could punch logic holes in the plot if you really wanted to, but I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want to.  I'd say it definitely belongs up there with Replay and Harry August in this corner of the genre.

Will check out Dark Matter before long.

Definitely check out Wayward Pines (Pines is the first book), with a similar caveat to just dive in and not read anything about it beforehand if you haven't been spoiled already.

[drawkcabi]

11 hours ago, Winterfella said:

Just finished reading this a few days ago.  I really liked it too.  I thought it got more convoluted, understandably, in the latter half, to the point where you could punch logic holes in the plot if you really wanted to, but I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want to.  I'd say it definitely belongs up there with Replay and Harry August in this corner of the genre.

Will check out Dark Matter before long.

Definitely check out Wayward Pines (Pines is the first book), with a similar caveat to just dive in and not read anything about it beforehand if you haven't been spoiled already.

I had the exact same thoughts!

I will check out Wayward Pines soon.