Parallel by Lauren Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
So I have to be honest, this book started out a bit slow for me, but I ended up really loving it. And I realize that the reason it felt a bit slow to begin was because a lot of different elements had to be set up before we could really get into the meat of the story.
In Parallel, we first meet Abby Barnes working on the set of a soon to be released action movie with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. But this was never really her dream. She had aspirations to enjoy her last year of High School with her friends, go to Northwestern and graduate with a degree in Journalism and eventually work for a major newspaper. On the eve of her 18th birthday she finds herself wondering how things would be different if she had just made different choices.
When she wakes up the next morning, she’s not where she expected to be and she struggles to make sense of what is going on. She’s now living a life where her parallel self from a year earlier makes decisions that impact what is going on in her life today and she has to deal with the consequences of those decisions.
While I found myself thinking Abby was a bit self-centered and a bit whiny, I also found that I felt bad for her. Because of this ‘event’ happening the things that she wanted and had dreamed for her whole life were being affected and she had little control over the outcomes but still had to deal with the impact her younger self’s actions caused.
The plot was incredibly unique and the way that Miller weaves the two parallel stories together really worked well, being able to see the choices that 17 year old Abby was making and why and then being able to see the impact of those choices at a later date really worked here and was really well done. I found myself trying to predict what was going to happen but really had a hard time doing so.
I loved that we also got to see the impact her choices had on her friends. You could really see the way her choices didn’t affect just her and I think sometimes it’s easy to forget about that.
There is a bit of a romance to this story… when I say bit, I just mean that while romance was a big part of the story for Abby, I didn’t feel like it was a romantic book… Others might feel a bit different than me on that. I didn’t get enough of a connection with either Josh in her parallel world or Michael in her current world to get a feel for her relationship with either one, but I did end up liking one more than the other.
There is a lot of Science involved in this story… not to the extent that you have to be a genius to understand… don’t get me wrong, it’s just there are some scientific theories that help to explain what is happening and why it is happening. The idea of a parallel universe is incredibly intriguing and this story was done to perfection. Is it real scientific information that is out there? I don’t even know and to be perfectly honest I don’t really care, because it totally worked for this book.
In the end, this story really is about fate and destiny and how that determines the outcomes of our lives. Do we really have a choice in where we end up or who we end up with in the end? I guess that’s the big question!!
Definitely a must read if you find parallel universes intriguing and absolutely if you’re looking for something different and unique!
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