This book was really interesting. Not all of it worked, but I’d prefer that it make the attempt than stick with something more conventional.

We follow Holly Sykes from 1984 to 2043, only the first and last chapters are from her point of view. The first chapter, in many ways, is actually really quite impressive. The voice here is my favourite. Young and Irish and full of vinegar, Holly has a fight with her mam about a boy not worth fighting about, as teenagers are want to do. When she concocts a wild fantasy about the two of them running away to London, or anywhere far away, really, she ends up running right into him with her best friend, which sends her into a teenage angst spiral that leads her to run away from home.

Only, that’s not what the story, nor her own story, is actually about. But it’s also exactly about that.

There is a through line of the paranormal happening as well. Holly meets people who are akin to her, somewhat, in that she can hear voices. They range from scary to odd, just like her brother Jacob, who hasn’t been the same since recovering from an illness a few years back.

Holly’s life, however, ends up never being quite what she wanted or expected or aims for. We learn this as the book jumps forward in time across ages. And we see Holly from the eyes of a supporting cast of characters that are actually quite disparate.

This actually worked really well for me, surprisingly. Characterizing and learning of her life as though she were the sun being orbited by these people, and with a mystery nugget tucked away regarding a family event that occurs that precipitates the jumping forward in time in the first chapter. We don’t really know why Holly is important. Or if she actually is.

There is a meta level component to this that other Mitchell books I’ve read so far do not (or was aware of at the time, anyway). I’ve read Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet which, by the way, should be read before this book because there’s some pretty big spoilers in this one regarding the plot. In this meta level plot, though, we know more is going on with Holly, and the entire oeuvre of Mitchell’s books, presumably.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to, despite the less deftly handled paranormal components to this meta story that directly affects Holly, and which she influences. To what degree, I won’t give away. Thankfully I read plenty of cyberpunk and sci-fi, so the creation of new words and their repurposing for setting is something I roll with, even if some of them probably could have been more intuitive and less dumb sounding.

The meta interwoven with spots of Holly throughout her life as she becomes older and comes into her own, worked well. We see her contrasted nicely with her teenage years and there is a through line with Hugo Lamb’s choice, I won’t say what that choice is, that harkens back to Cloud Atlas really nicely. I really like Mitchell’s way of slipping into new and old characters, and underlining sort-of emotions and movements clearly important to him, as they reoccur. In particular: Love.

In the end, Holly’s story kind of feels nicely wrapped up, but also like it’s setting something up. Maybe Slade House has some things to say about these characters yet? Either way, I was mostly satisfied.

But there were a few things that didn’t work for me. One of them was the overlong chapter dedicated to the writer. Who wasn’t very likeable, though that came along by the end, somewhat. I felt like that chapter could have been truncated, but what’s more is, I don’t think a few questions were actually answered that were raised there? Why did the ending happened, who was that person and the contours of their plan wasn’t ever gone into, was it? There’s also a bit of hand waving with the supernatural happens with plot holes, plot beats, and I’m not sure the soft worldbuilding technique did it any favours.

That said, everything else felt good. The questions raised at the start were particularly fun, when revealed. And the battle at the chapel, because of the way it was written—being that it was hard to describe—did some fun things with my brain. For me that whole sequence looked like a weird animated pastel, very much like the opening to Scott Free Productions movies. Where there’s a man who changes into bird. That whole chapter kept me up late at night as it was just exciting to read and picture in my head. And again, that first chapter really flew by and set up so much payoff without the reader really catching on to how much what happens influences Holly and others lives.

Also, learning the additional meta stuff about Thousand Autumns, also quite neat and made me think a lot about how the meta stuff could tie into other books and characters. The detriments seem small, compared to the high points I had with this. Will continue on to Slade House next. I’m on a mission to read all of his books now that I have all of them, including Utopia Avenue!