For those who are not familiar, the novel is set up very uniquely. There is an opening chapter which introduces the reader to the main actors and our narratorial voice, Jane. At the end of this chapter Jane is presented with a choice to choose to follow five different characters. Depending on which she follows she ends up in a different genre. Now because they all stem from the same set-up, all the same plots are still in the background, they just play out different depending on Jane's involvement. This is kind of hard to explain without specifics, so without trying to give too much away: In choice 1, Jane gets involved in a whodunnit mystery. The item that got stolen is still stolen regardless of which choice Jane makes, the resolution of the whodunnit just doesn't matter to Jane when she is involved in other details.

This structure is fascinating to me, creative and a lot could be done with exploring it, but I have a lot of issues with Cashore's execution which led to me rating this novel with only two stars.

First, I don't understand why each choice leads to a different genre. The first two are a mystery and a spy thriller, but the other three are horror, science fiction, and fantasy. So the last three are much, much harder to be believable are happening in the background of the other plots, especially the horror plot which involves

the house (and the missing stepmother) to be eating guests of the house. In the other plots, there aren't any people mysteriously missing and the way certain characters are effected by the house is not apparent in the other plots

.

Second, I don't think Cashore does a good job in representing each genre. Short fiction doesn't seem to be a strong suit of Cashore's, but each of these multiverse stories is, essentially, a short story which does not entirely belong in the genres they represented. For instance, in the first plot, the mystery, one of the generic requirements of the mystery genre is that the reader is left with enough clues in order to solve the mystery on their own, so at the end you have one of those "I should've figured that out!" moments, or the delight of having outsmarted the detective. Jane is not a good detective and she fully admits her conclusion to the mystery basically comes from intuition. There are similar problems in each of the other genres as well. Cashore attaches a large number of the trapping of certain genres to her plots--spaceships in the science fiction plot, magic in the fantasy plot, spies in the spy thriller, stolen valuable goods in the mystery--but does not seem to really understand how these genres fundamentally function.

Third, although the novel's trajectory hinges on Jane's choice she doesn't make a lot of active choices; her choice is ultimately who to follow and which plot to watch unfold. Although she does make some active choices along the way, she is a fairly reactionary character. I found myself much more interested in other characters--especially Kiran--than in Jane. She sort of fades into the background as only a conduit for the reader to observe. Cashore says on her blog that she originally wrote this in second person as more of a choose-your-own-adventure and that presents, to me, even more problematics, of turning a living human being into a tool for her story, not just paper and ink people.

I love Cashore's other books (the Graceling Realm trilogy) and have even written about them in my academic career, so I was disappointed that this new offering from her was not more fleshed out. I think she is an imaginative writer, but I think she needs to still hone her craft more.