This book was… okay. It was a quick read, but if I’m being totally honest, I wasn’t blown away by it.
I feel like the best stories are ones where you can suspend your disbelief enough to make it feel realistic – in the way that millions of children reading Harry Potter for the first time fully believe that their Hogwarts letter will be arriving on their doorstep the moment they turn eleven. The same also goes for stories not set in fantasy worlds. When the narrative of a fiction book removes you from the story just enough to look at the characters from an outside perspective, but also not so much that it feels like they’re fiction – that’s the sweet spot. And perhaps it’s because the action in this book takes place over the course of a single day, but I just found it to be too unrealistic and unbelievable that it didn’t resonate with me as much as I would have liked it to.
That being said, I liked the fact that this book has short chapters – some only one or two pages long. It makes for a quicker pace, both physically reading and with the action, and I think for this story it is definitely necessary to prevent it fizzling out. I also managed to read this book in a single day because the writing is easy to follow and not overly complicated.
I also enjoyed the dual perspectives of Daniel and Natasha. The two led nicely in to one another eg. if Daniel was describing Natasha walking into a shop then Natasha’s perspective would pick up directly from the moment that she enters. It was very seamless in transition, and worked well with the overall plot.
Moreover, I also quite liked the ending. It was certainly unexpected for me as I was utterly convinced that she was going to get what she wanted and those last few pages took me by surprise.
I feel like I know a book is really good (worthy of at least four or five stars), when:
a) I cry at the ending.
b) Go on thinking about the book for days after I’ve finished it.
c) Tell everybody I know to read it.
Unfortunately, while this book is a lovely, heartwarming story, it just didn’t impact me very much. However, as this written with young adults in mind, I am not the target audience (as I’m closer to 30 than 20!), and perhaps it might resonate more with a different audience.
Favourite quotes:
✨ ‘Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.’
✨ ‘We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.’
✨ ‘According to multiverse theory, every version of our past and future histories exist, just in an alternate universe. For every event at the quantum level, the current universe splits into multiple universes. This means that for every choice you make, an infinite number of universes exist in which you made a different choice. In this way we get to live multiple lives.’
✨ ‘I don’t believe in love.’ ‘It’s not a religion,’ he says. ‘It exists whether you believe in it or not.’
✨ ‘Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.’
✨ ‘The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two.’
✨ ‘Growing up and seeing your parent’s flaws is like losing your religion. I don’t believe in God anymore. I don’t believe in my father either.’
✨ ‘Thing about falling is you don’t have any control on your way down.’
✨ ‘People just want to believe. Otherwise they would have to admit that life is just a random series of good and bad things that happen until one day you die.’
✨ ‘We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.’
✨ I think all the good parts of us are connected on some level. The part that shares the last double chocolate chip cookie or donates to charity or gives a dollar to a street musician or becomes a candy striper or cries at Apple commercials or says I love you or I forgive you. I think that’s God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us.
✨ ’Observable fact: People aren’t logical.’
✨ ‘People spend their whole lives looking for love. Poems and songs and entire novels are written about it. But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?’
✨ ‘You’re just looking for someone to save you. Save yourself.’
✨ ‘Human beings are not reasonable creatures. Instead of being ruled by logic, we are ruled by emotions. The world would be a happier place if the opposite were true.’
✨ ‘It is better to see life as it is, not as you wish it to be.’
✨ ‘Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass.’
✨ ‘Life is just a series of dumb decisions and indecisions and coincidences that we choose to ascribe meaning to.’
✨ ‘But he’s no planet, just the final fading light of an already dead star.’
✨ ‘Tragedy is funny.’ / ‘Are we in a tragedy?’ he asks, smiling broadly now’ / ‘Of course. Isn’t that what life is? We all die at the end.’
✨ ‘Love always changes everything.’
✨ ‘I think we’re all connected, everyone on Earth.’
✨ ‘Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges. Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.’
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