A review by story_singer_101
Recursion by Blake Crouch

emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I feel like this book tried to do too many things and so didn't quite manage to do all of them well. The themes, characters, and plot threads all had great potential, but they kept getting in the way of each other so that none of them felt fully fleshed out or developed. By the time I was about 80% of the way through the book, I was thoroughly confused about what would happen in the last 20% to wrap everything up. Character development happened, but it almost always happened off-screen and was filled in later with summary sentences. There were villains and problems, but most of the work to resolve those problems or eliminate the villains happened again off-screen. I never truly felt immersed in the story because so much time was spent on a few key moments and then massive amounts of plot and life happened between pages before the next key moment. I honestly think the first half of the book could have been its own book, the second half could have been its own book, and the epilogue could have been a whole book in and of itself with the amount of material covered and glossed over. 

In the book's favor, it was one of the few time travel stories that actually made sense and wasn't internally inconsistent in weird ways. That in and of itself is a win in my book.

I keep seeing people commenting that Dark Matter was better, so maybe I'll give that a try next. This one just didn't quite do it for me.
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