This is a tale of how the choices along the way can change the way one experiences a story. This was on my reading list for a while, tagged SF. I never read the blurb. Maybe I should have. I might have had more realistic expectations.

First off, the the title was misleading - at least for me. I expected much more physics and way less of a human/mystery story than this was. The SF appeared mostly as a device to set up a dramatic story because the story takes place in Chicago (mostly) roughly in the present. The protagonists are ordinary people, just a physics professor, an art instructor and their son. There are no aliens, space-ships, AIs or cyber action, just a single device that changes not even the world just the lives of one family. A metaphor about choices made and regrets...

That story was—after the initial setup which took way too long for this impatient reader—well-told, fast-paced and unputdownable. The first quarter of the book took me two days to read and then I finished the rest in one long afternoovening.

Towards the finish there were several interesting turns and I got more and more curious how each of these would resolve or if they could be resolved at all. I should have expected that more than one Jason would make it back to his original world. I really enjoyed the police station stunt. Then again the return to the cube should also have been obvious but somehow it wasn‘t

If I the initial pacing had been a little faster and I had not expected so much more SF, this might have been a 5* read. Overall this was a well-told plot that could have derailed in its own complications at a number of points but didn’t as the author’s choices along the way led to an enjoyable story, so I‘ll likely recommend it to friends. Maybe even friends who normally do not read SF.

If you liked this multiverse themed novel, try [b: And then there were N-One|36696441|And Then There Were (N-One)|Sarah Pinsker|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|58496528] a short story I discovered the other day accidentally.