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This was an enjoyable and fun read. The plot was in many ways a typical sci-fi setup with its space ships, aliens, multiverse, and one person being the only one who could save the earth, and so on, but with plenty of nice twists and interesting aspects. The characters were well-developed and believable.

There were a couple of minor negative points. At one point, they look for a planet in a given constellation, but they are not on earth at that moment. The author appears to be unaware of the fact that stars in a constellation are not close together at all, just in more or less the same direction from earth (and vastly different distances away). So being 'in' a constellation makes no sense in 3D space. Then there is the whole dubious concept of, "it doesn't matter if we mess up earth, we will find a new planet". I know that this has been a staple of sci-fi for decades, but now that we know just what damage we are doing to the earth, that is actually quite a dangerous line of thinking. Releasing all sorts of other animal species onto a new planet is even more stupid. It is ironic (or maybe even on purpose?) that starlings are released. Someone once had the bizarre idea that they should release all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare in the USA, and they went ahead and did that, including starlings. That has caused quite a bit of environmental damage.

Nevertheless, those are minor points and in the end, this was a real page-turner that I enjoyed reading.

I received an advance review copy for free from BookSirens, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

What a strange book! It is saturated with superstition, and magical significance is attached to all sorts of things like walking with the left or right foot over a line or various numbers. And the protagonist is obsessed with numbers, assigning all sorts of meanings to various apparently random numbers. He is also obsessed with smells.
There is no real plot to the book. For most of the time, the protagonist is wandering through the fog looking for a house to stay, but not being able to find the address. It is very reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, with a similar dream-like state, and I was also reminded of Albert Camus' The Plague, although the reason for that that was harder to put my finger on. The atmosphere evoked, I suppose.
Some of the sentences were hard to make sense of. It is hard to know if that is the translation or in the originals. For instance, 'the handle of the bicycle'. Bikes don't have handles, they have handlebars.
Without the introduction, the whole book is also hard to make sense of. There we learn that the author belongs to the oppressed Uighur minority in Eastern China. Then a lot of the book becomes more understandable. But a lot remains a mystery. At least for me.

The copy of the book this is based on was kindly supplied by the publisher in return for an honest review on Netgalley.

I am a big fan of mosses, and so I enjoyed this book greatly. It was great to read the enthusiasm with which Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote about the mosses. The book is mostly aimed at people with little knowledge about mosses (unfortunately, that means nearly everyone), so there is a lot of basic biology in there. She has done quite a nice job of making that into a narrative by tying in various anecdotes and metaphors to the biology. Some of those work better than others, for example it is a bit of a jump from artificial insemination of the neighbour's cattle to reproductive systems of mosses. Nevertheless, on the whole, it works nicely livening up some sections which might have otherwise been on the dull side.
Although I live in Europe, mosses of the American mosses that she mentions are known to me, so that was nice. Their tiny spores (and migratory birds) ensure a worldwide distribution. There were a few unknown to me, like Brotherella , which seems to be a bit like a glossy Hypnum; also nice to make their acquaintance.
The descriptions of the field work are very recognisable to those of us who have done that sort of thing. I spent three summers with a tape recorder around my neck, standing in rivers reciting scientific names into it, so well remember the strange looks and comments that you get when doing that. Likewise, the description of the painstaking work of counting huge numbers of markers was familiar. I once had to cut ten thousand Sphagnum plants (or was it 10 000 of each species, I don't remember now?) to exactly 4 cm length, then measure how much they had grown over a year, and then repeat that the next year, and the next.
An extra dimension that the book promised was the insights and spirituality of the native American (Onondaga) heritage of the author. I was a little disappointed there. Some of it was difficult to understand. "...a place of power, vibrating with energy exchanged at a long wavelength", for instance. I don't know what the "long wavelength" means there, also as an analogy. A bit more depth in explaining about those concepts would have been nice. There was one concept which came back repeatedly, and that is one I have great difficulty with; "plants come to us when they are needed". Perhaps it is my lack of understanding, but it seems to me that the idea that the purpose of plants and animals being to serve the interests of humans has caused an awful lot of environmental destruction. In that sense, I was horrified to read that the author mentions the use of Sphagnum peat for compost in such an offhand way. Horticulture has been responsible for the destruction of huge areas of really important wetlands, and I would have expected the author to very clearly condemn it and warn her readers not to use peat-based compost. In that context, I am sure that she would agree that those plants are not there just for our needs, but have a right to exist for their own value.
I found one small mistake in the book. She says that most mosses only have scientific names. That is not correct, all UK mosses (and therefore many American) have English names, not to mention that all the mosses here in the Netherlands and Belgium have Dutch names and all the German mosses have German names (and I think French and Spanish names exist as well).
Unfortunately, the publishers have not done a good job with the ebook edition that I read. The page numbering is messed up and the aspect ratio of the illustrations is incorrect, so the images are distorted, which is a pity.
But those are small drawbacks in what is undoubtably a very worthwhile book.

This book was very easy reading, I got through it in just two evenings. The choice that the protagonist made at the end was not a surprise, the plot had clearly been building up to that for a while, but that was also not a big problem.

The basic premise is an interesting one. The author assumes that we are not bound by our circumstances, but that we have complete freedom to choose all the paths we take through life. He gives his central character an extraordinary set of talents to make the point. She has the talent (and opportunity) to become a world-class rock star, sportswoman and academic. That wasn't very convincing. Most of us don't have that level of talent or opportunity. I think this 'American dream' idea is probably part of the reason that the book is so popular, which is a pity as it is a bit of a myth. Not everyone in life has the same choices, not matter how talented they are. He is on stronger ground in showing that the small choices we make of kindness towards friends and neighbours can have a significant long-term effect on the lives around us.

There was one unexpected surprise in the middle. The experiments with zebrafish that were described were carried out by someone I know, using equipment from the company I work for. Nice!

Anyway, it was a fun read, and also thought-provoking.

This is typically a book which I would never had read if I hadn't received it as part of a subscription to a book club. That definitely illustrates the positive side of such a club, because the book is well worth reading and I learnt all sorts of things that I would not have otherwise known. In particular, the sections about Dutch society in the 70s and 80s (before I moved here) and from the perspective of someone a generation above me were interesting.
The book is written very straightforwardly and easy to read. It is quite lengthy, considering it is apparently the first of a trilogy. For example, the long accounts of failed relationships are not so interesting.
As with any autobiography, the book of course presents things very much from the perspective of the author. That is fine, so long as the reader doesn't think that they are reading objective history. For example, the techniques like the birthing stool that she introduced were perhaps not so universally welcomed by women as portrayed here.

There were a number of aspects of this novel that I found quite irritating. To begin with, the writing style. Some of the sentences are very long, more than a page long on page 81 for instance. A writer like Dickens is able to pull that off, but van Essen seems to sometimes just substitute commas for full stops and ramble on for ages. Those woolly sentences are sometimes interspersed with equally extremely short sentences, sometimes just fragments without a verb. I suppose that he is aiming for a particular effect, but I'm afraid I found it just irritating. Some of the long dialogues are just plain boring.
Another thing that was irritating was that he decided not to use quotation marks when someone is talking. The result is that in longer dialogues it isn't always clear who is talking, and even less clear if someone is talking or just thinking something.
A third aspect of the style which I struggled with was that the protagonist has no name. That is more often, but there were several occasions when the author tied himself into unnatural knots to keep to that, "... hij sluit af met mijn naam' ["...he finished by saying my name"]. And finally, that we have no ideas about where the journey goes is also doubtless on purpose (the 'plotless thriller'), but that was also wasted on me.
I am a big fan of science fiction, so was looking forward to that aspect. That was a little disappointing, for example, most of the technology was either a bit silly (the crawling rucksacks - or was that a nod to Terry Pratchett's Luggage?) or is already in prototype today. The car being able to measure emotions by means of physiological measurements was an interesting one because I have actually helped write several research proposals on precisely that topic in the last years. I must say though, the sex scene with the car was the most ridiculous sex scene I've ever read. Was it there for a sort of joke or because it seems to be compulsory to have a sex scene in Dutch literature? It didn't work for me. And as our heterosexual male protagonist has sex with the car, it makes the car female? But then directly afterwards, the car is chasing females around like it is a male? That doesn't seem very well thought out, unless it is deliberately some sort of gender fluidity there.
There are two aspects where the book does succeed a little better, in my opinion. The unreliability and lack of permanence of memory is explored from various perspectives. That does raise some interesting issues, although van Essen does seem to think that memory is a sort of recording that can be corrupted; it is in fact a construction.
Secondly, the relationship of the child (and then man) to his mother (and indirectly to the rest of his family) is explored. That is done in an interesting way, though that also is sometimes a little long-winded.

First, a few 'random' observations:
I was so disappointed that the enhanced squid didn't turn out to be the dominant species in the Manifold at the end, especially after the teaser when Baxter wrote that they were inherently better fitted for space travel than humans. But he even wrote "Humans are the most important sentient creatures who have ever existed, or will ever exist", just to take away any hope I might have that it was going to come. What a missed opportunity, it would have been so much more interesting that way.

"His elaborate [South African] accent, forever linked to a nightmare past, made her skin prickle." The book was written in 1999. At that time, the accent indeed made me cringe, but encouragingly, it is not 'forever', it is now not a problem.

"This has been a good place to cycle,” Anna said dreamily. “Of course that’s why we built it this way.”
“You built a toy universe so you could ride your bikes?”
She grinned at Emma. “If you were ten years old and could build a universe, what would you do?”"
Nice thought, but why ever would Stephen Baxter think that having fun riding bikes is only for children?!

"Suppose you have a lily, doubling in size every day. In thirty days it will cover the pond. Right now it looks harmless. You might think you need to act when it covers half the pond. But when will that be? On the twenty-ninth day."
Who would have thought that with the pandemic, we would all have heard such illustrations of just what exponential growth means multiple times?!

The book is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the "real" (according to the acknowledgments) science is rather dubious. For instance, the probability argument makes no real sense, especially to anyone who knows the first thing about population dynamics. The section on flitting between parallel universes is boring. But in general, it was a great story, enjoyable reading and not too dated.