Okay, I've been thinking about this a lot. I originally gave this one two stars but that's really not fair.

Here's the deal, there were sections of this book that were very much two stars. Continuity issues (talk to me about the damn snow), some story lines that felt left hanging or man handled, and lack of any discussion of why the world had gone to shit. Although, the feral parrots were quite cool I thought.

But, there were some story lines that were absolutely lovely and so well written that I wanted them to become the book I was reading: Lily, Phil, Emma, the moving of all the books to the new 'library system', and the painters constantly repainting the solar system on the ceiling of Grand Central Station. Those bits were lovely.

( )

I liked it and didn't like it at the same time. I loved the opening and the idea of meeting oneself every year. However, I hated the extreme amount of self-loathing and the mental gymnastics required to process the third act of the story.

Also, how about telling me how the world is as it is? There's nothing about the world the protagonist is in, and he doesn't even wonder how it has gotten to the place it is.

I did like the romance, though I felt it was drawn out for too long. ( )

I am not certain how I feel about this book yet...it was certainly something new and convoluted in the time-travel genre, and was a refreshing read. One day I'll read it again to get a better handle on my opinion of it. ( )

Quite an enjoyable book. The idea is bulletproof. It's about free will in a situation where there seems to be no free will. How would you get along with all the different versions of yourself through time? Older you's wondering about the stupidity of youth, and younger you's wondering why you messed up so badly. I would like to think that younger me's would try to learn from older me's, but youth is full of arrogance. ( )

This book is why I read outside my literary fiction comfort zones. A time-traveling, dystopian murder mystery with a main cast of one, this book basically blew my mind. I am sitting here, wondering about it all, unable to read anything else.
At first, the premise sounded way too good to be true; no one has ever (to my knowledge) written a novel like this before. When things started getting hairy- and there is no other word I would pick to describe the mess the narrator found himself, in his own life- it began to really bother the O.c.d. In me.... Such a convoluted, confusing, hairy mess!! And then the running..... So... Much... Running. I was exhausted just reading about it. But I digress:

Each year our narrator (who has no name) celebrates his birthday at a party in an abandoned hotel in a future New York where the only guests are past and future versions of himself. The book starts with his 39th birthday party, the year that a dead version of himself and a beautiful woman in a red dress appear at the party for the first time. What has been a fairly consistent experience for the past years, is suddenly untethered from the sequence of events he thought he knew. How are there versions of himself at the party older than the dead one? (PARADOX!!!). Where did this woman come from, and why has she never been here before? How do the younger versions of himself keep doing things he has never done before? There is a tear in the fabric of his own time, and only he can repair it. And then the narrator has to go back in time 6 months, to stop the unnecessary death of someone he loves a great deal (and this is where it gets really GOOD!!)
I know, it sounds like a terrible sci-fi movie. And I see how the book may seem like an unnecessarily complicated mind game. But the ways it asked me to reflect on being, identity, self-hood, reliance and interdependence made it more than simply a puzzle to be solved. I can not stop thinking about the ways these versions of self fit together and what it means for those of us in the real world to have past and future versions of ourselves that we are responsible for and to. Combined with how well Ferrell described the settings and the result is a book that is cinematic, in the best possible way.

I may need a parrot tattoo, now.....

Must read!!! ( )