Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pages: 416
Format: DRC
ISBN-10: 0544634241
ISBN-13: 9780544634244
Publisher: eBook | Hardcover
The one thing that’s certain is they met on a Cambridge street by chance and felt a connection that would last a lifetime. But as for what happened next . . . They fell wildly in love, or went their separate ways. They kissed, or they thought better of it. They married soon after, or were together for a few weeks before splitting up. They grew distracted and disappointed with their daily lives together, or found solace together only after hard years spent apart. With The Versions of Us, Laura Barnett has created a world as magical and affecting as those that captivated readers in One Day and Life After Life. It is a tale of possibilities and consequences that rings across the shifting decades, from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and on to the present, showing how even the smallest choices can define the course of our lives.
What if... isn't that something you ask yourself sometimes. What if at that moment I made that decision. This book tells the story of 2 people making a decision at a certain point in their lives. It tells three different paths that could have happened if a certain decision was made. The idea is great and there are a lot of things that do work in the book but I got overwhelmed by the story. By the number of names in each story having to remember who goes where. The book is changing chapters indicating which live we are following in the chapter name. The narrating changes between Eva and Jim so we get a good view about their part of the story. The whole book I was jumping between this life, that life and Eva and Jim totally loosing track. I needed the first page of the chapter to get the story back on track again and some chapters are only three pages making me loose all flow that was. I guess if I had been reading a paper book I would have read the stories separate. This made the experience of reading the book tiring which is a shame because as I said there are things that work.
Eva and Jim have the same character more or less in the three stories. Though build by experience the base of their personality is the same which makes the 'if the had decided to do that' experience more real. I never got the feeling the author lost track of the story or stories actually either. If you love the different perspectives on one life stories this could be a great read though I would advice to get a paper copy so you can cheat on the chapter line up.
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