Blurb Book Review: All This & More by Peng Shepherd (spoilers ahead)

Cover image from Goodreads.com

If you’re a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure, this is the book for you.

Marsh is unhappy with how her life turned out. She was on track to become a lawyer when she got pregnant. While she never regretted having her daughter, she did regret not finishing law school to become a high-powered lawyer.

A new technology has been invented: the personal quantum bubble. This tech was tested on a reality TV show called All This and More, where the contestant could make any change – big or small – to her life. This show was an instant hit, with more viewers glued to their screens than any other broadcast ever. Season one was such a huge hit that season two was announced.

But season two hit a snag and stopped production halfway through. Much later, season three began with Marsh as the contestant.

At first, Marsh is hesitant to make choices, but that hesitation falls away fast. Marsh grows more and more confident and takes bigger and bigger risks to have the perfect life. Glitches start to appear, like an ex-boyfriend appearing where her husband should be, and the word ‘Chrysalis’ shows up in every iteration of the bubble’s creations.

Marsh soon suspects something is very wrong with the bubble, but her producer and the bubble itself seem to be obstructing her from finding out the truth.

This novel is set up as a Choose Your Own Adventure, with big choices being made just prior to the next TV episode. The reader gets to choose what Marsh does next for each episode. The novel can be read linearly or the reader can flip back and forth in CYOA style. I did both, making sure I read every choice, just to see if everything gets covered (yes, it does, which is very satisfying). There are three possible endings as well, each one ending with a choice to read the Acknowledgements page or the About Author page, which was a nice way of keeping the consistency of the novel and making sure the reader knew that was the very end.

Overall, the novel was wildly entertaining. Marsh starts out hesitant and frightened of choosing and ends confident and able to decide what she wants. I admire the author for being able to pull this off – for being able to create timelines that are both consistent and coherent while being very different. Assembling the novel must have been a feat in and of itself.

I loved the author’s first work, The Book of M, and disliked the second one, Cartographers, so I went into I All This & More with a wary eye, but it turned out that I was glued to the pages throughout.