Thank you reading challenge! "Claire North's" book has been popping up as a recommended reading for me for nearly half a decade, yet the similarities between the jacket description and the plot of Ken Grimwood's Replay put me off from reading what seemed a highly hyped knock-off. With my local bookstore's summer reading challenge, though, I decided to check it out from the library to use as an option for one of the squares. While I ended up not using it for that purpose, having the copy lying around was the final incentive I needed to read it.

 

And I'm so glad I did, as it proved to be far better than the derivative work I was expecting. North's novel takes the premise of a person reliving their lives that Grimwood devised and takes it in some fresh and interesting directions. The idea of a community of "kalachakrans" or "ouroborans" (as the people reliving their lives call themselves) is interesting enough; what makes it so especially fascinating was how they create an existence that allows for communication across time. It turns the central conflict of the novel into a chess match that is all the more suspenseful for the stakes involved. My only regret by the end of the book was the sense that the rich possibilities of North's world had only begun to be explored. In a literary world overflowing with sequels and series, this is one where a follow-up would be most welcome!

While most people stay up late to finish a book, I managed to do the opposite. I fell asleep around my usual bedtime, only to wake up three hours later. After a few minutes on social media, I decided to try to get back to sleep by reading Claire North's book, which had been sitting on a table ever since I checked it out from the library a couple of weeks ago. That provide a mistake, as I stayed up past the break of dawn to finish it. Now I'm exhausted, without the benefits of getting a few hours of sleep before tackling my day.

 

Still, it was totally worth it.

"Complexity should be your excuse for inaction"

“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.”

This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood.

And he’s not alone. A very small subgroup of people have this same characteristic, and they find each other across time, passing messages backward and forward across the generations. In general, they take care not to change any of the big moments in history, but now someone has decided to play with the fate of the world. Harry must act before the universe itself is damaged beyond repair.

I won’t give away more than this basic setup, because part of the delight of The Fifteen Lives of Harry August is in discovering how it all unfolds. Time travel stories necessarily have logical inconsistencies, and the same is true here, but Claire North has kept them to a relative minimum, perhaps more by sleight-of-hand distraction, developing characters and ideas so well that by the time I gave the logic too much thought, I was already so involved in the story that I wasn’t really bothered.

I was more nervous that, as is often the case, the author wouldn’t know what to do with the ending, that it would peter out in anticlimax or collapse under its own weight or resort to cheap tricks to cheat its way through. North is better than that. She steams right on through to one of the more satisfying endings I’ve read in quite some time.

Claire North is the best kind of speculative writer: imaginative, unafraid to take on big ideas, smart enough to follow through. I’m excited to read more.

(This review was originally posted as part of Cannonball Read 10: Sticking it to Cancer, One Book at a Time.)

"Complexity should be your excuse for inaction"

“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.”

This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood.

And he’s not alone. A very small subgroup of people have this same characteristic, and they find each other across time, passing messages backward and forward across the generations. In general, they take care not to change any of the big moments in history, but now someone has decided to play with the fate of the world. Harry must act before the universe itself is damaged beyond repair.

I won’t give away more than this basic setup, because part of the delight of The Fifteen Lives of Harry August is in discovering how it all unfolds. Time travel stories necessarily have logical inconsistencies, and the same is true here, but Claire North has kept them to a relative minimum, perhaps more by sleight-of-hand distraction, developing characters and ideas so well that by the time I gave the logic too much thought, I was already so involved in the story that I wasn’t really bothered.

I was more nervous that, as is often the case, the author wouldn’t know what to do with the ending, that it would peter out in anticlimax or collapse under its own weight or resort to cheap tricks to cheat its way through. North is better than that. She steams right on through to one of the more satisfying endings I’ve read in quite some time.

Claire North is the best kind of speculative writer: imaginative, unafraid to take on big ideas, smart enough to follow through. I’m excited to read more.

(This review was originally posted as part of Cannonball Read 10: Sticking it to Cancer, One Book at a Time.)

Series: N/A

Publisher: Redblock (2014)

Genre(s): Mystery, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction

 

I really liked this book and YAY for Claire North for making non-linear narrative work! 

However, I didn't really like that the story was so narrow in scope (although it is grandiose, or it seems so): I wanted to know all the secrets of people like Harry, I wanted to know all the whys. I was more like Vincent than like Harry, I guess.

Still, a very good book!