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morvram's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
im_ruth_less's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.5
thebeardedpoet's review
4.0
Side Life is one of the weirdest books I've ever encountered. For me that's a good thing. I like strange. It's right up the alley of Philip K. Dick. In writing this book, Steve Toutonghi clearly kept pushing forward grasping for the next bizarre complication sentence by sentence and page by page. The only downside for wild "Twilight Zone-esque" stories like this one is they are difficult to bring to a satisfying conclusion.
usbsticky's review
3.0
I had real mixed feelings about this book. I liked the beginning a lot. At one point I couldn't put it down but round about the half way part I thought it was a mess. 2/3 of the way through, it was readable again. Towards the end I thought it had one of the most unlikable endings.
Spoiler: The book is about a man who finds sideways traveling machines in the basement of a house he's house sitting. Once he gets in, he finds he's traveling in parallel universes. Parallel universes where sometimes his friends are alive and sometimes dead. He also meets up with fellow travelers who use the same house.
End spoiler.
I thought the idea and the beginning were great. But I also thought the author lost it and couldn't make the idea run. Some of it was just uninteresting, silly, made no sense, depressing, lacked focus, etc. The ending was bad. If I had lost the book before getting to the middle, I would have given it 5 stars. Now I split the difference.
I got this book as a free ARC.
Spoiler: The book is about a man who finds sideways traveling machines in the basement of a house he's house sitting. Once he gets in, he finds he's traveling in parallel universes. Parallel universes where sometimes his friends are alive and sometimes dead. He also meets up with fellow travelers who use the same house.
End spoiler.
I thought the idea and the beginning were great. But I also thought the author lost it and couldn't make the idea run. Some of it was just uninteresting, silly, made no sense, depressing, lacked focus, etc. The ending was bad. If I had lost the book before getting to the middle, I would have given it 5 stars. Now I split the difference.
I got this book as a free ARC.
reasie's review
4.0
Excellently thoughtful, and the protagonist's journey from unlikeable tech twat to zen-like self-awareness is perfectly believable in a way that's genuinely hard to achieve.
The tech feels believable in an unbelievable way and the stakes are truly terrifying.
The only reason I'm not giving it five stars is, well, the ending is very literary... we are left with lots and lots of questions... the few that are answered are answered rather roughly. (The bit with M. and J. near the end I say to avoid spoilers. Touch rushed.)
I mean... the whole point is that the hero has to give up his "drug of choice" -- the need to know answers. But to a spec fic fan in particular that's hard to accept. Which is kind of brilliant, but sorry I'm still taking your last star. My review and I am a capricious god. :D
The tech feels believable in an unbelievable way and the stakes are truly terrifying.
The only reason I'm not giving it five stars is, well, the ending is very literary... we are left with lots and lots of questions... the few that are answered are answered rather roughly. (The bit with M. and J. near the end I say to avoid spoilers. Touch rushed.)
I mean... the whole point is that the hero has to give up his "drug of choice" -- the need to know answers. But to a spec fic fan in particular that's hard to accept. Which is kind of brilliant, but sorry I'm still taking your last star. My review and I am a capricious god. :D
ichbinphoenix's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: War and Violence
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts and Murder
Minor: Child death and Cannibalism
ury949's review
4.0
This review seems spoily - actually, my advice is to not read reviews or summaries - just read the book. If you must know, it's about inter-dimensional travel. Or, if you want to know more specifically, read on...
This was nuts. What to say? A five star book with a lackluster ending. But how does one end a story like this? I suppose figuring that out is what would make it amazing enough for five stars.
But still - infinite dimensions is attempted here, again, and fearlessly brought to new levels of consideration. For example: consider infinity. Really. I'm not talking about a world where you went to one college verses worlds where you chose to go to different colleges. I'm talking about a world in which one leaf on one tree at one moment in time - say a million years ago, to the second, fell, verses another world where it fell at a different moment - say a million years and a second ago, and every iteration of that for every leaf on that tree, and every tree that's ever been on Earth ever, PLUS every combination of those iterations possible - and that's just the leaves on trees! I'm talking a world where a dog wags his tail seven times when he sees you when you came home yesterday, verses one where he wags eight times, or six times, for every time you've ever came home, for every dog that's ever greeted a person coming home, every number more or fewer wags of every dogs' tail, PLUS every tadpole more or fewer that survived in every pond in the history of the Earth; every minute more or fewer of sleep that every creature could have had every night they ever slept in all of time; every second sooner or later you could have stepped on your brake pedal for every single time you and/or anyone else ever braked; and any other combination of mundane differences that could technically make one time different from another. If you think about it, even one single day has infinite different ways it could happen, even if it always started from exactly the same point. So as Vin discovers, there are infinite possibilities that you will end up in a different timeline from the one you started from.
But then there's Mona - I love her! She's got the most worn down, defeated attitude; it's amazing. And yet she can still f-up Vin's whole highly-educated understanding of infinite universes by suggesting that in each one, he still turns out to be an asshole, no matter what. Which could totally be true, too. In the span of one human's life, some things will just never happen: you will never conceive a child and give birth to a tree, for example. Maybe Vin just can't not have a temper? Nature/nurture? Free will?
But wait, there's more. There's possession or occupation of another individual's mind, the source of voices in one's head, novel ideas, and levels of conscious and unconscious thought. The separation of physical body and one's conscious self. The ethics of how you treat your "other selves" or the worlds/bodies they live in.
The future in this story is depicted as some surprising and unexpected solutions - they are amazing. Best though is the relativity of it all. Vin enters the creche - or the machine that transports his conscious mind first to the mind of another individual - often in a desperate situation - in another time/world, and then back to his body in a mostly similar but not quite the same present. And things get more and more wack until eventually, he looses something and thinks that if he goes through the cycle, eventually, he could come to a world like he originally had. It's the ultimate time/dimension-traveler's goal: to return to their original world/time (think Sliders). But his scale of "messed up reality" is so unbalanced. It's crazy! But then Mona once again has the slap of reality for him - doesn't it make sense that if there was an ideal world for Vin, but the book just ends.
Something I got as I was reading this is Vin, all the versions of him, actually has way way way more crazy trips that what is covered in this book, but we only follow one, consistent version of him. Somehow, this short book could have been wayyyyy longer - I'm not sure if it should have or not. Quite ambitious as it is; I'm not sure many could have taken it much further than it is taken here. So big chunks of it you have to sort of improvise in your head - that's part of the fun of it, though. I'd recommend to some - but not all. Some of the thoughts this provoked in me actually were quite hard to swallow - I almost started crying while reading in the waiting room at the dentist. But if your mind doesn't wander to heavy dark concepts, I'm not sure you'd get as much out of this one. Go read [b:Dark Matter|27833670|Dark Matter|Blake Crouch|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472119680s/27833670.jpg|43161998].
This was nuts. What to say? A five star book with a lackluster ending. But how does one end a story like this? I suppose figuring that out is what would make it amazing enough for five stars.
But still - infinite dimensions is attempted here, again, and fearlessly brought to new levels of consideration. For example: consider infinity. Really. I'm not talking about a world where you went to one college verses worlds where you chose to go to different colleges. I'm talking about a world in which one leaf on one tree at one moment in time - say a million years ago, to the second, fell, verses another world where it fell at a different moment - say a million years and a second ago, and every iteration of that for every leaf on that tree, and every tree that's ever been on Earth ever, PLUS every combination of those iterations possible - and that's just the leaves on trees! I'm talking a world where a dog wags his tail seven times when he sees you when you came home yesterday, verses one where he wags eight times, or six times, for every time you've ever came home, for every dog that's ever greeted a person coming home, every number more or fewer wags of every dogs' tail, PLUS every tadpole more or fewer that survived in every pond in the history of the Earth; every minute more or fewer of sleep that every creature could have had every night they ever slept in all of time; every second sooner or later you could have stepped on your brake pedal for every single time you and/or anyone else ever braked; and any other combination of mundane differences that could technically make one time different from another. If you think about it, even one single day has infinite different ways it could happen, even if it always started from exactly the same point. So as Vin discovers, there are infinite possibilities that you will end up in a different timeline from the one you started from.
But then there's Mona - I love her! She's got the most worn down, defeated attitude; it's amazing. And yet she can still f-up Vin's whole highly-educated understanding of infinite universes by suggesting that in each one, he still turns out to be an asshole, no matter what. Which could totally be true, too. In the span of one human's life, some things will just never happen: you will never conceive a child and give birth to a tree, for example. Maybe Vin just can't not have a temper? Nature/nurture? Free will?
But wait, there's more. There's possession or occupation of another individual's mind, the source of voices in one's head, novel ideas, and levels of conscious and unconscious thought. The separation of physical body and one's conscious self. The ethics of how you treat your "other selves" or the worlds/bodies they live in.
Spoiler
Often, Vin gets horribly killed in his travels through other people's bodies, yet these painful and traumatic experiences are oddly addictive - which makes sense in some way. I was just waiting for a chapter where Vin gets violently tortured or raped - the book never goes there but it totally could have.The future in this story is depicted as some surprising and unexpected solutions - they are amazing. Best though is the relativity of it all. Vin enters the creche - or the machine that transports his conscious mind first to the mind of another individual - often in a desperate situation - in another time/world, and then back to his body in a mostly similar but not quite the same present. And things get more and more wack until eventually, he looses something and thinks that if he goes through the cycle, eventually, he could come to a world like he originally had. It's the ultimate time/dimension-traveler's goal: to return to their original world/time (think Sliders). But his scale of "messed up reality" is so unbalanced.
Spoiler
In one world literally all his friends and family have been killed (he doesn't want to stay there, understandably), whereas in another world, he is upset because he no longer has a cat he used to have - and that alone justifies his inter-dimensional travel.Spoiler
that he would never leave it? See, he has to leave a world, via the creche, in order to come to that world; it has to be a world in which he felt he should use the creche - so it wouldn't make sense, she muses, that he would ever come into a perfect world. Still he comes to some worlds that seem totally fine - yet for some reason that Vin decided it was worth risking a trip in the creche. And it is here, after a lot of soul-searching, life-changing experiences, and wondering all the what-if-possibilities that Vin sort of makes a mini revelation and well there's more,Something I got as I was reading this is Vin, all the versions of him, actually has way way way more crazy trips that what is covered in this book, but we only follow one, consistent version of him. Somehow, this short book could have been wayyyyy longer - I'm not sure if it should have or not. Quite ambitious as it is; I'm not sure many could have taken it much further than it is taken here. So big chunks of it you have to sort of improvise in your head
Spoiler
- just how many different passwords are there? And how often does one have to go to Armageddon before he or she wants to go back?rachelini's review
2.0
In theory, this was a book I would love. The basic idea was so intriguing - the ability to move between versions of your life, and the differences in those lives. It just didn't come together for me.
danlewisfw's review against another edition
4.0
A bit of a freaky book, I seem to be running into the books that are sort of insane a lot here lately. Not that I am complaining about that. There were a few times where it was a little difficult to keep it all straight but it was a well done book with a really good story. I am pleased that I read it and I have a feeling that it will stick around in my brain for a while.
snorrelo's review against another edition
3.0
Weird, interesting but unfortunately ultimately unfulfilling.