Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

 

I was lucky to be able to still grab a galley of the much talked about thriller/mystery Who is Maud Dixon? I needed a plot-driven, page turner to get my reading mojo back. And this clever, twisted debut novel did the trick. I stayed up reading past my bedtime!

Florence had been raised to believe she was special and would accomplish big things. She did leave Florida and her single mom for New York City and the world of publishing. But, instead of being a big name writer, she works for an editor who has just sold her first book. Florence is frustrated and imagines another life, the life she *should* have, the success she deserved.

After sleeping with her boss's boss, she becomes obsessed with the man's family, stalking his wife and studying her, imitating her. It lands her in hot water, and without a job.

Then an opportunity arises for her to be the assistant to the best-selling author whose book was a major influence in her life. Maud Dixon was a pen name, and only one person knew who the real person behind the novel was...until Florence is hired to become her personal assistant.

Maud is really Helen Wilcox, only six years older than Florence. Helen is not a nice person. She is blunt, self-centered, cold-hearted, and sarcastic. Florence manages Helen's finances, correspondence, and types her work in progress which arrives in indecipherable handwriting so Florence has to insert her own words. It is also damn poor writing; Florence could do as well.

Helen makes the sudden decision for them to go to Morocco for research. When Florence wakes up in the hospital, a policeman calling her Ms Wilcox, she learns there was a car accident she can't recall--and Helen has disappeared. Florence does not correct the assumption of her identity, and hatches a plan to take over Helen's life for herself. 

Florence becomes embroiled in far more than she expected, and with several more plot twists, instead of gliding on Maud's fame and riches, she must escape prison and death.

The success of the novel rests on plot. Helen and Florence feel like 'types' and even the idea of assuming another's identity is not original. It took me more than half the novel to be hooked into that late night reading to finish the story. Still, it is a fun read. And, truly, there are few of us who never fantasized about the life we believe we are owed, or were jealous of another's success. 

I was given a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Who is Maud Dixon?
by Alexandra Andrews
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date March 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780316500319
hardcover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Florence Darrow is a low-level publishing employee who believes that she's destined to be a famous writer. When she stumbles into a job the assistant to the brilliant, enigmatic novelist known as Maud Dixon — whose true identity is a secret — it appears that the universe is finally providing Florence’s big chance.

The arrangement seems perfect. Maud Dixon (whose real name, Florence discovers, is Helen Wilcox) can be prickly, but she is full of pointed wisdom -- not only on how to write, but also on how to live. Florence quickly falls under Helen’s spell and eagerly accompanies her to Morocco, where Helen’s new novel is set. Amidst the colorful streets of Marrakesh and the wind-swept beaches of the coast, Florence’s life at last feels interesting enough to inspire a novel of her own.

But when Florence wakes up in the hospital after a terrible car accident, with no memory of the previous night — and no sign of Helen — she’s tempted to take a shortcut. Instead of hiding in Helen’s shadow, why not upgrade into Helen's life? Not to mention her bestselling pseudonym . . .

Taut, twisty, and viciously entertaining, Who is Maud Dixon is a stylish psychological thriller about how far into the darkness you’re willing to go to claim the life you always wanted.

One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021

GoodReads * LitHub * CrimeReads * Town & Country * New York Post * Wall Street Journal

about the author

Alexandra Andrews has worked as a journalist, editor and copywriter in New York and Paris. Who Is Maud Dixon? is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

The Memory Collectors by Kim Neville

My home is filled with heirlooms and mementos, each associated with a person or time from my past. Wherever we moved, settling these things into the house transformed it into a home.

Some of these things make me a little sad, but most make me happy. I have good memories of the student lamp from Great-Grandma's house, the 1842 ogee clock we bought at our first auction, the cracked glass miniature vases Mom set on her knick-knack self, the fourth generation back heirloom Blue Flow soup bowls, the embroidery mom made for me, the Japan figures gifted to my husband on his birth. 

Very few people look at these things and feel the things I feel when I see them.

But...what if the emotions people feel could attach to their things and be sensed by others? What if these emotions changed those who encounter the objects? What if some people could sense this emotional baggage and use it for harm or health?

Kim Neville's debut novel The Memory Collectors imagines people with the special ability to sense the emotions that cling to things. 

Ev tries to control it, suppressing the effects of the 'stains' on things. She saw how her father fell victim to dark stains. She was unable to save her parents from the evil that overtook him. She has tried to protect her younger sister, Noemi, who flits in and out of her life. 

Harriet has hoarded these stained things. They are overwhelming her and affecting her neighbors, too. Perhaps she could make a museum filled with good feelings, a place of healing? When she mets Ev, she knows she has found the person who can help her.

We can hide from the past, suppress it, reject it. We can become enslaved to the past so it inhibits our growth. We can shape the past into works of art. And we can rise above the past to become changed and whole people.

The Memory Collectors is a fantastic story that uses fantasy to explore our common human struggle with the past and the lingering emotions that inhibit our growth. 

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Memory Collectors

Kim Neville

Expected publication: March 16, 2021
Atria Books
ISBN: 1982157585 (ISBN13: 9781982157586)
Paperback $17.00

from the publisher

Ev has a mysterious ability, one that she feels is more a curse than a gift. She can feel the emotions people leave behind on objects and believes that most of them need to be handled extremely carefully, and—if at all possible—destroyed. The harmless ones she sells at Vancouver’s Chinatown Night Market to scrape together a living, but even that fills her with trepidation. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Harriet hoards thousands of these treasures and is starting to make her neighbors sick as the overabundance of heightened emotions start seeping through her apartment walls.

When the two women meet, Harriet knows that Ev is the only person who can help her make something truly spectacular of her collection. A museum of memory that not only feels warm and inviting but can heal the emotional wounds many people unknowingly carry around. They only know of one other person like them, and they fear the dark effects these objects had on him. Together, they help each other to develop and control their gift, so that what happened to him never happens again. But unbeknownst to them, the same darkness is wrapping itself around another, dragging them down a path that already destroyed Ev’s family once, and threatens to annihilate what little she has left.

The Memory Collectors casts the everyday in a new light, speaking volumes to the hold that our past has over us—contained, at times, in seemingly innocuous objects—and uncovering a truth that both women have tried hard to bury with their pasts: not all magpies collect shiny things—sometimes they gather darkness. 

Long Bright River by Liz Moore; Kensington and Me

Kensington view in 1982; once a manufacturing center, most of the factories were abandoned

A hot, humid Sunday in late July, the atmospherean elixir of chemical smells.No human voice breaks the stillness of hazy air.Here is only the arid stretch of concrete,the glare of sun on trolley tracks,the vacant, lidless, terrible black holesof abandoned factorieswhose broken walls spew silent sighsinto deaf, empty streets.The sky is faded to a worn blue-gray
cloudless under the early strong sun. 

from The City Dead by Nancy A. Bekofske

I had no patience. I had to read Long Bright River NOW. I picked it up on Friday. Saturday it rained all day long and I spent it reading. I finished the novel before I turned out the light to sleep.

I had read Liz Moore's novel The Unknown World and loved it. But my interest in this new novel was it's setting--Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood where we lived for just under two years, leaving in 1982. 

the view from our back door on Allegheny Ave. in 1982

I was a sheltered girl from the Detroit 'burbs. Driving down Allegheny Avenue I once quipped that I never wanted to live there. A few years later, my husband turned down an associate pastor position at a posh suburban church and asked for an inner-city position. And we found ourselves in Kensington, a few blocks from K&A. 

Our home on Allegheny Ave. near B St. was once posh 'doctor's row'

The house had an enclosed porch, once a waiting room, a living room once divided from the dining room and the kitchen in the back. Upstairs were three bedrooms and a bath. The basement had a cedar closet stuffed with every curtain that had hung in the parsonage, a 1930s gas range, and an asbestos covered furnace that powered the hot water heat.

the back bedroom with original closet with shelves

And cockroaches of all types and mice that took over the oven. I cleaned before we cooked--dishes, oven, stove, countertops--everything.

we were surrounded by empty factories

My husband had a two-point charge. The church at Front and Allegheny was larger.

Providence UMC at Front and Allegheny Ave.

Nestled in the middle the neighborhood rowhouses was Mt. Pisgah at Kip and Cambria. 

Mt Pisgah, Kip and Cambria, Kensington

Don't get mad--get even, we were told, was how things were done in Kensington. They laughed at our ideals rooted in an easy life.

The houses were valued at $2,000. They could not afford to move to the $25,000 houses in Mayfair. There was no off-street parking. No jobs. Young adults paired off and had children while still living with their respective parents. The youth hung on street corners under the streetlights. But they kept an eye on things, protecting their own. They always greeted us.

walking to dogs around the block in Kensington

Long Bright River centers on K&A, Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Once a thriving business center in a working-class neighborhood, but more recently the 'Walmart' for opioid addicts.

Allegheny Avenue, under the El

Allegheny Avenue

In the opening scene, cop Mickey and her partner Lafferty are called when a body is found. 900 overdose victims were found in Kensington the year before, and Mickey fears that her estranged sister Kacey will be the next one.

When more bodies of young women are found, Mickey becomes obsessed with finding her sister, who has been an addict since her teenage years. She risks her job, her relationship with her four-year-old son, and her life as she searches to find Kacey. It is a journey that takes her deep into the back streets off K&A and into the heart of the underworld of drugs, prostitution, and crime.

View of Kensington from the El

Moore's characters are conflicted and real, the plot foreboding and dark, and the setting vividly drawn. It was like I was back.

On every corner was a bar and a small store. In the hot summer nights, we could hear the booming bass of music from the jukebox at our local bar. The summer sun could be relentless. People sat on their 'stoop' and visited in the cooling evening. Kids played in the car-lined streets.

Our neighbors included a man who worked for a neighborhood $1 movie theater with a teenage son. The son would jump from his roof into the yard below when he saw me leave the house. I would not let him get a rise out of me and merely said hello.

On the other side was a family of renters. We would sit on the stoop evenings and chat.

Kensington street in 1980

I walked to K&A and took the El to work. Or we went downtown to Center City to shop or to go to a concert or museum--something the locals never did. All over the city, people stuck to their local neighborhoods. Maybe went to see the Mummer parade on New Year's Day. 

As schoolkids, Mickey and Kacey were bused to the Academy of Music to see The Nutcracker, something we saw several times. For Mickey it was magical.

Allegheny Ave. near B St., looking east toward Kensington Ave. The scene from our stoop.

Other Philly locals appear in the novel, including the adjoining neighborhoods of Fishtown and Port Richmond.

And Olney. When we left Kensington, we moved to Fern Rock, a few blocks from downtown Olney and lived there for seven years. Our Kensington renter neighbors were sad to see us leave and said we were the nicest neighbors they ever had.

me and our dogs at our stoop

The new pastor and his wife moved in. The neighbor boy broke into the house and stole from them. He later killed himself after beating his girl.

 walking the Ave

In 1982, Kensington was still mainly Catholic, white, and blue-collar. Ten years later, it had shifted ethnically, and all over the city, new drugs were taking over. Every now and then I would Goggle and learn more of its decline into the center of drugs and prostitution.

We left Philly in 1990 and returned to Michigan. I never forgot living in the most foreign place I had ever lived in--K&A.

In the novel, Mickey escapes to Bensalem in lower Bucks County; we had moved to Morrisville in Bucks Co. in 1974. It was a world away from Kensington. Mickey's son misses his school friends, his dad who lives in South Philly and who Mickey is avoiding.

The novel has surprising twists, painful scenes, and yet a hopeful ending.

Moore gives the opioid crisis faces and stories and we think, these people, these good people with blasted lives--it could happen to any of us. These children, born to addicts, born with addictions, growing in poverty and without hope. How can we allow this?

The Children
by Nancy A. Bekofske
1982

Our children are dying.
Their eyes, full of broken wings, haunt me,
their questions sear the air like exhaust fumes.

How can we shatter such purity so?

Childhood's haven destroyed,
there is left no serene rock 
upon which to root and grow.
They learn to walk on the jagged edges
of broken dreams, and to feast
on the small parcel of silence
between abuse and misuse.

And who we cannot kill, we strip
of immunity, prey of disease, 
the lure of easy money.
Playing on their porches
they are victims of war.
In the school yard
dogs are let loose on them
or sprays of bullets.

I have seen them on the streets
longing for a place to belong to,
knowing the world is a hard place,
learning to be hard to survive.
Dwarfed, afraid, they murder,
enacting dreams of power and control
over things too big to ever control,
filled with visions of Hollywood glory.

And this is the generation we will age under.

Years hence when we are confronted in anger
we cannot plead innocence:
These children alone are innocent.

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Mcneal

The Crystal Palace was built to house the first International trade fair. Championed by Prince Albert, the exhibition hall was a showcase of the Industrial Age's newest inventions. The art displays impacted Victorian taste and inspired an interest in Japanese and Moorish art. Objects included the rare, like the Kooh-N-Nor diamond, and the commonplace, like three Kentucky-made bed quilts. Then there were the curiosities of which the Victorians were so enamored. Fourteen taxidermists had displays like stuffed kittens sitting at a table having tea.

The Crystal Palace is at the center of Elizabeth Macneal's novel The Doll Factory.

It is Dickensian in its sweep of characters.

There are the enterprising street urchins Albie and his sister, children who take up any work to provide for themselves--including prostitution and providing dead animals to the taxidermist Silas Reed.

Silas, damaged, unloved and unloveable, is one of the most interesting and chilling villains, more complicated than Bill Sykes and less self-aware than Uriah Heap. Silas is most drawn to curiosities, things both grotesque and lovely.

Silas is fixated on the girl Iris, whose collar bone was broken at birth, leaving her with a marred beauty.

Iris works painting porcelain doll faces with her sister Rose. Iris longs to escape the drudgery of her work, secretly painting with dreams of being an artist. Rose's gorgeous beauty was ruined by smallpox, leaving her bitter. Albie earns a bit by sewing simple skirts for the dolls.

And into this mix we have Louis Frost, a bohemian artist in the new renegade school of art called the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood.

Louis needs a model for his painting. Iris longs to escape the drudgery of doll faces, secretly painting with dreams of being an artist. A pact is made: Iris will model for Louis and he will teach her to paint.

Iris blossoms under Louis's tutelage. But a jealous Silas fantasizes she really loves him. We are taken into a horrifying descent into Silas's sick world, with a Gothic plot twist, and a climactic ending.

I loved this journey! As a devotee of Victorian Age literature and art, and for the page-turning thriller ending, it was perfect.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Doll Factory
by Elizabeth Mcneal
Atria Books
Publication August 13, 2019
$27 hardcover
ISBN13: 9781982106768

ISBN

The Dinner by Herman Koch

Our book club read this month was Herman Koch's The Dinner. I had seen Goodreads friends who had read it and enjoyed it. I didn't realize it was a dark  'thriller'.

The novel begins slow, and well, is actually boring, the narrative voice telling how he and his wife are getting ready to meet another couple at an upscale restaurant. They are not looking forward to it.

We learn that the other couple is the narrator's brother and sister-in-law, and the brother is going to run for Prime Minister.  The brothers have a strained history and relationship. The narrator had a 'meltdown' in the classroom when he was teaching and was on medication.

There is a scene before the dinner where the narrator looks at his son's cell phone and is not pleased with what he discovers.

How would this evening, our dinner at the restaurant, have proceeded, had I indeed quit right then and there? from The Dinner by Herman Koch

There is a lot of description of the meal and the staff and how the sister-in-law is wearing dark glasses to hide that she has been crying.

And when we discover what it is that brought these parents together, you may wish you were not reading this book. It's too late--you have to keep turning pages. The crime is so horrendous! And the cover-up is even more disturbing.

The plotting is masterful.

But I wish I had not read this book!

Did I mention it is DISTURBING?

What would YOU do if your fifteen-year-old son had committed a crime? How far would YOU go to protect your child?

Maybe we don't take that seriously enough...How young they are. To the outside world, they're suddenly adults, because they did something that we, as adults, consider a crime. But I feel that they've responded to it more like children.  from The Dinner by Herman Koch

Would you rationalize your child's behavior? Hide the crime? Smooth the way without repercussions? Or make the child own up to his error, support their turning themselves over to the authorities? Would consider bribery or threats or violence? Or set a standard of morality and law?

So be forewarned--you will encounter some nasty folk, and if you pick the book up, be prepared for a slow simmer that comes to a roiling boil!

Feared by Lisa Scottolline

It was Lisa Scottoline's Rosato and DiNunzio series that brought me to reading her and Mary DiNunzio remains a favorite character. Who can resist a South Philly girl with a close Italian community that includes so many Tonys--Pigeon Tony, Tony 'Two-Feet', Tony-From-Down-the-Block, not to forget Mary's husband Anthony! Just reading about her mother's gravy makes me hungry for pasta.

In Feared, Scottoline once again puts Mary in harm's way. But this time it's not just Mary's life that is on the line, for she is seven months pregnant.

Nick Machiavelli has targeted Bennie Rosato and her partners Mary and Judy in a lawsuit accusing them of sex discrimination in hiring. And their associate John's own words are being used against them. They are being sued as individuals and they could lose everything.

Then John turns up dead and Judy is the last one to have seen him alive.

Mary struggles with the demands of her career and impending motherhood. Judy mourns the loss of her happy ending. The clients are small fry business owners who are about to be swallowed by the big fish in the market. And John's brother with Cerebral Palsy may be force feed for convenience.

With her signature blend of humor, memorable characters, mystery, and thrills, the novel kept me turning pages. Through twists and turns and red herrings, you will be on a wild ride to an unexpected resolution.

I received an ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Feared: A Rosato & DiNunzio Novel
by Lisa Scottoline
St. Martin's Press
Pub Date 14 Aug 2018
ISBN 9781250099594
PRICE $27.99 (USD)

Invitation to a Bonfire

At fifteen, Zoya Andropov was sent to an orphanage where she cross-stitched portraits of Party members, her stomach growling from hunger. Her parents, who were on "the right side" of the Russian revolution, had died soon after "the new and glorious union of our country," like everyone else she knew.

Then in 1928, she was one of 200 USSR orphans chosen to be sent to America, ending up at the small, elite, Donne School.

Impoverished and alien, she is bullied and manipulated by the rich American girls. After graduation, now Zoe, she stayed on to work in the greenhouse, victimized still by the schoolgirls.

When her favorite writer, Lev Orlov, is hired by the school, Zoe is thrilled. With him is his imperious wife, Vera, who Zoe saw once at a Young Pioneers meeting when they were girls. The wealthy Vera was then "whisked off to Paris" where she met Lev Orlov. After reading the manuscript of his first novel she claimed to have burned it as unworthy of his potential genius. Their relationship is parasitic.

Lev is a philanderer and Zoe becomes one of his conquests. Lev relies on Vera's judgment to organize his entire life and work but he resents her as much as he needs her. He hatches a plan for Zoe to murder Vera.

Invitation to a Bonfire is mesmerizing and it is disturbing. We are taken to Moscow and the bonfires of typewriters using Old Slavonic, a time when a child's belief in the Soviet State was stronger than familial love. Coming from the ashes of the Revolution are Zoya, Vera, and Lev, struggling with alliances and the nature of love, manipulating and testing each other.

The bulk of the novel is Zoe's diary from 1931 in which she shares her childhood back story and her love affair with Lev. Interspersed are Lev's letters to Vera and documents from the Donne school and an Oral History of Vera with interviews with people who had interacted with her.

There are plot twists that surprise with a quick wrap up ending. Perhaps too quick after such a long set up.

The characters Vera and Lev are inspired by Nabokov and his wife Vera, and I read the style is inspired by Nabokov's novels. Which made me wish I had read Nabokov in the last century; I read his books in the 1970s.

The book recalled to mind other addictive and disturbing reads, like The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith or Nabokov's Lolita. Unhealthy characters are always interesting and compelling.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Invitation to a Bonfire: A Novel
by Adrienne Celt
Bloomsbury USA
Pub Date 05 Jun 2018
ISBN 9781635571523
PRICE $26.00 (USD)

The Cuban Affair by Nelson DeMille

Nelson DeMille's first book with his new publisher Simon and Schuster is The Cuban Affair. I have previously read several of DeMille's books, including The General's Daughter.

DeMille's character-driven story introduces Daniel "Mac" McCormick, a veteran of the Afghanistan war who has settled in the Florida Keys to run a chartered fishing boat. His mate Jack is a Vietnam Vet. Mac is up to his ears in debt, and frankly, he's a little bored.

Mac is contacted by an anti-Castro group of Cuban exiles who want his help for a covert mission to recover money hidden by exiles when they fled the revolution. "Behind every great fortune is a crime," Mac thinks, not wanting to know how the money had been made. It's a dangerous mission, but the idea of the reward of three million dollars is enticing--as is Sara Ortega who will be his accomplice. They will go to Cuba undercover as part of a Yale tour group.

After a trip to Cuba, DeMille wrote this book to give a portrait of the country and to show the tenuous 'thaw' in American-Cuban relations. Readers tour the island along with Mac, Sara, and the tour group. The island is full of Hemingway places and references, including Islands in the Stream in which Hemingway wrote, "The Cubans double-cross each other."

The 'affair' is a double entendre, for not only is this an episode or event in Mac's life, he also has a love affair with Sara.

The story is told in the first person by Mac, who has a welcomed dry sense of humor, but a decidedly masculine sensibility that did not always sit well with me. Sara is a character who will appeal to women: strong, sure, smart, and brave.

There is more an atmosphere of threat for most of the book, with a thrilling sea chase conclusion. Character, place, and the love story are the hallmarks of the bulk of the book.

Will the love affair survive Cuba, land of daiquiris, danger, and palm trees? Or was it a holiday fling more based on proximity and an awareness that death could be waiting for them? Read it and find out.

I received a free book from the publisher through a Goodreads giveaway.

The Cuban Affair
by Nelson DeMille
Simon and Schuster
Publication Sept 19, 2017

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

Last year I read Sarah Pinborough's book The Language of Dying and liked it very much. Since that book had a magical element I early expected that Behind Her Eyes also involved something of the same.

Behind Her Eyes was a fast read, but I did not read it in one sitting as publicity warned might be the case.

The story is rather tawdry: single mom Louise meets David in a bar and they 'connect', but he says he can't and leaves. The next day she learns the man is in fact her new boss. Then 'by accident' the bosses wife, Adele, meets Louise and pursues a friendship. Adele hints at a troubled marriage and a controlling husband. Louise likes Adele, but then David shows up at her door and they act on their mutual attraction; an affair ensues.

Louise struggles to compartmentalize her life between Adele and David. Meanwhile, chapters from Adele's viewpoint reveal she is not what she appears to be, and her backstory is slowly revealed to Louise.

David and Louise are caught it a web, a trap, with a shocking and unpredictable ending, they get what they thought they want.

The novel carries the reader along and the pacing is great, and the reader is kept guessing and sidetracked by unreliable information.

Personally, the strange double coda of an ending seemed manipulative to me. The characters are not people we like, although because of their lack of self determination. So the emphasis is on the complicated and twisting plot.

I expect this new contribution to Domestic Noir will be a best seller. It is better written than several other thrillers I read in the last year.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Behind Her Eyes
Sarah Pinbourough
Flatiron Books
Publication January 31, 2017
ISBN 978-1-250-11117-3

Opening Doors: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

When I open a book and see a quote from T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton from his Four Quartets I am predisposed to like what comes after. Dark Matters by Blake Crouch begins with this quote:

"What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened."

I sped through Dark Matters in a few sittings. I had read the beginning on Read it Forward and liked it enough to request it for my Blogging for Books choice. I was not disappointed. I do enjoy a book that is a nice plot-driven read.

Jason is a happily married man with a son and a nice job. He could have been remarkable--so could his wife--but they 'settled' for good enough and a happy family life, no regrets.

"You could have won that prize," Damiela says.
"You could have owned this city's art scene."
"But we did this." She gestures at the high-ceilinged expanse of our brownstone..."And we did that," she says, pointing to Charlie..."

Then Jason is kidnapped and shunted into an alternate reality where he achieved great things while some other man got his wife and kid. All Jason wants is to get back home to the reality he loved.

The science behind Jason's dilemna is 'dark matter', the theoritical mystery thought to hold the universe together, and the concept that every possible occurance exists simultaneously, although we are aware only of the reality we exist in. Jason must open the doors into alternate realities until he finds the one he knows as 'real'; then he must displace the interloper who has become Jason, as well as the other Jasons who have been created by his visitations into other realities during his quest.

"My understanding of identity has been shattered--I am one facet of an infinitely facted being called Jason Dessen who has made every possible choice and lived every life imaginable. I can't help thinking that we're more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity."

I appreiate that Jason's love for his wife and son motivate him to endure suffering and death threats to return to them. It is ordinary life that is held beyond value, and which the various Jasons struggle to gain. It's almost like a Greek Myth, the hero's journey to come home.

A Dark Matter movie is already in the works, and it will be awesome.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present." - Burnt Norton

Dark Matter
Blake Crouch
Crown $26.99 hard cover
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0