Characters: 5/10
Jason Dessen is what happens when you mix a textbook midlife crisis with a physics degree and give it a gun. He’s the poster child for “white guy protagonist has feelings and consequences ensue.” His entire character arc is built around the idea that he gave up his Nobel dreams for family and now lives in a purgatory of self-pity. And yes, I get that’s the point. Regret and sacrifice and all that. But I don’t need to hear about it every five pages.
Worse, he’s a personality void. The only thing that defines him is what he gave up. His motivations are repetitive, his emotional reactions are flat, and the only growth he undergoes is deciding not to murder himself for convenience. Congratulations, I guess?
Daniela is less a character and more a vessel for Jason’s longing. Her entire existence is filtered through his idealization. When we finally get her perspective? It's too little, too late. Even her “choosing” Jason in the end has nothing to do with her desires—it’s framed as fate. Amanda, the only interesting female character, is dropped like a side quest the author couldn’t be bothered to finish. She deserved better.
AltJasons? Great idea, wasted execution. There’s no effort to individualize them. They’re just a swarm of mustache-twirling variants ready to stab each other for the right to own a woman and child like emotional accessories. Gross.
Atmosphere/Setting: 7.5/10
Here’s where the book almost shines. Crouch is good at tone. The dread, the claustrophobia, the creeping wrongness of being in the wrong reality—it all works. The lab scenes are eerie, the desolate alternate Chicagos are unsettling, and the early abduction sequence is legitimately tense.
But then it stops innovating. Once the multiverse gimmick is introduced, every world is just a slightly tweaked version of the last. Snow. No snow. Chicago, but kind of weird. Chicago, but apocalypse. The Box—the actual vehicle of world-hopping—is described like a spooky hallway with doors and nothing else. Why is it always just a hallway? Why can’t we get even a little speculative creativity in how this device manifests?
The settings serve the story, but they don’t enrich it. They’re background dressing for Jason’s internal monologue, which never shuts up.
Writing Style: 5.5/10
Crouch writes like he’s auditioning for a Netflix pitch meeting. Short sentences. Lots of italics. Cliffhanger paragraphs. No room to breathe. It’s “thriller writing” in the most industrialized, algorithm-approved sense. Every sentence feels optimized for speed, not substance.
Dialogue exists mostly to push the plot forward or give Jason a platform for his man-pain. Internal narration is repetitive to the point of parody. (“Do I love my wife? Do I deserve this life? Who am I really?”—every five pages, like clockwork.)
And the science? Don’t even get me started. The “quantum superposition serum” might as well be magic glitter. The entire premise relies on you believing that intense emotion = GPS coordinates in the multiverse. It’s less science fiction and more “emotionally compromised man punches quantum reality with his feels.”
Plot: 6/10
Cool premise, botched execution. The beginning is genuinely gripping. Jason gets abducted, wakes up in a lab, realizes someone else is living his life. That’s good stuff! But the moment he starts reality-hopping, it turns into a glorified fetch quest for “my perfect reality.”
Every new universe is a reset button. The stakes are temporarily high, but nothing sticks. The whole middle third of the book is just Jason wandering around like a sad Sims character: inject self, open door, despair, repeat. There's a hint of psychological horror when he starts losing track of who he is, but that gets tossed aside in favor of action.
Then comes the ending, which is both over-the-top and underwhelming. Seventy-plus Jasons all converging to kill each other? That should be epic. Instead, it feels ridiculous and emotionally hollow. The resolution—“Let’s just run away to a new timeline!”—is a narrative shrug. It’s the story equivalent of turning off your phone instead of answering the hard text.
Intrigue: 6.5/10
Yes, I kept reading. But that’s not because the story was deep or surprising—it’s because Crouch knows how to string you along with microcliffhangers and vaguely threatening tension. It’s literary fast food. Addictive, but ultimately unsatisfying.
The first third is full of mystery. But once the central reveal happens (Jason2 did a Kill and Replace, surprise!), the story becomes linear and weirdly predictable. The multiverse gets less interesting the more we see of it. There’s a constant feeling that the book could do something smart or twisty at any moment—and then doesn’t.
Logic/Relationships: 4.5/10
You want internal consistency? Too bad. This book is powered by emotion juice and hand-waving. The Box works because... you believe really hard. Or love someone really much. Or have unresolved trauma. That’s not science fiction—it’s manifestation with extra steps.
And the relationships? Shallow. We’re told Jason loves his wife and son more than anything—but we rarely see that love outside of generic flashbacks and obsessive narration. Daniela’s side of things is nearly absent. Charlie barely registers as a person. Amanda had chemistry with Jason, and the book just... deletes her.
Also: the AltJasons being willing to kill dozens of versions of themselves over a woman they haven't seen in months? That’s not romantic. That’s Love Makes You Evil taken to a toxic, vaguely incel-ish extreme. And Crouch never really interrogates that.
Enjoyment: 6.5/10
I enjoyed parts of it. The first act, specifically. But once the book revealed what it wasn’t going to do—interrogate its own premise, give emotional depth to its characters, explore its world with curiosity—I checked out emotionally. I was flipping pages by habit, not hunger.
This could have been a profound meditation on identity and choice. Instead, it’s a dude getting existential whiplash in a sci-fi escape room and then speed-running a multiverse of regrets until he finds a timeline where he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences.
Final Score: 5.9/10 — An aggressively mid-tier sci-fi thriller with a killer premise, breakneck pacing, and all the emotional depth of a Twitter thread about alternate realities. Entertaining, but deeply flawed.
