A review by tyras_bookshelf
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I really liked the book, fast paced and entertaining even if the science felt like nonsense at times.

It’s mostly sci-fi but the overall theme of the book is like “choose love” but also “life is full of choices and we have to be okay with ours”.  

*spoilers ahead*

The ending was too open ended to be enjoyable to me. Knowing the elements of the box (and the rules that the book set up), I don’t trust that they are just safe at the end. Charlie came back around to be such a central part of the ending when he barely felt like a character throughout the book so that didn’t feel realistic either. I think it would have been more poetic for Daniela to have chosen the world. Ryan should have been a bigger part of the story too. 

The book was actually pretty violent and weirdly sexual at times- or like too focused on it. I thought it was interesting that Daniela could only tell Jason1 was the real one by having sex with him. 

Crouch kinda wrote himself into a hole with the Jason’s outthinking themselves because if they’re the same then why wouldn’t all the Jason’s have come to that same conclusion? but I’m choosing to believe that jason1 was so fundamentally attached to his world that he was the only one who could think that way to outsmart the others. 

Some of the plot points weren’t explained away well enough like letting all the other Jason’s get to v1 world was too easy and I didn’t track how that happened. And the ending was like “and they all lived happily ever after”. Yes, there was a bunch of murder at the end but we don’t get to see the new world they walk into? After all that build up, the payoff didn’t feel as sweet. 

I liked it, I recommend but much of the science and prose was quickly skipped over so I could stay with the plot. Overall, pretty good read and very creative.  
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