Audience: Adult

Format: Physical/Owned

I love Thursday nights.

- first sentence

Such an ordinary opening line for an extraordinary story. Jason (a college professor), his wife (Daniela), and their teenage son Charlie spend Thursday nights together, making dinner, eating, and talking. Until the Thursday when Jason goes to meet his friend at a bar and is abducted on the way home. He wakes up in a world he doesn't know. He is confused and wondering which world is real and which is the dream/crazy place he made up in his brain. The truth is even crazier and trying to wrap my mind about it almost broke my brain.

I was fascinated by the story and trying to figure out how Crouch was going to resolve the main problem of getting Jason back to his wife. Every time Jason stepped out of the box, I was thinking, "no - go back in, it isn't safe!" But he kept going out into worlds that obviously weren't his. I especially loved that Crouch didn't shy away from the last problem that kept Jason from being happy - I didn't even think about it until it happened, but then it made perfect sense.

Another highly recommended Crouch novel!

I read this for Booklikes-opoly Beach Week 10 (author's last name begins with one of the letters in BEACH). At 342 pages, it is worth $3.00.

OMG! Every time I think I finally wrapped my mind around this story, Crouch adds something else to mess with my mind.

DNF @ 127p. (of 255p.)

Dark Matter was Paver's first book for the general adult readership, and it shows. To me, this still reads like a YA novel and I cannot get invested in the story or the main character's situation.

What is worse to me, reading Dark Matter after having read Thin Air, is that Dark Matter reads like a practice piece - that, with a few tweaks, would develop into Thin Air later. 

I ended up skipping ahead to the end of the story and am glad to have done so. The similarities with Paver's later book are very strong, so I do not feel I missed much by "abridging" this read.

Still bored.

After a couple of weeks of unusually warm and dry weather, we're finally back to a more typical state of affairs: it's dark, cold, windy, and wet. 

So, I'm going to spend tonight with a suitable book to accompany the misery outside while hugging a mug of something warm. 

Dark Matter should do the trick. 

So far, the story is very atmospheric but not very gripping. We'll see how it goes but it certainly isn't as good as Thin Air so far.

Or maybe this is because I liked Thin Air so much?