Anna

The kind of book that makes you feel warm inside. Life, love, family, small town, everybody's mostly happy most of the time. Can recommend as a light reading to help cheer up.

It's a light read, the kind of book with a log of dialogue where pages flow easily. It's entertaining and keeps you engaged until the end.

At times it's funny. Some jokes are good, but some are the kind where you give a short laugh out of politeness, others the kinds where you feel embarrassed and pretend you didn't hear. Some jokes were good until they were repeated a few times too many.

The problem I have with Backman's writing—and that's my personal opinion—is that I find many of his characters unlikeable. Not in a villain sense, but like a Ben Stiller movie, where each new embarrassment makes you cringe, instead of rooting for the hero.

The book does offer depth (unlike Ben Stiller movies), as it covers important topics, such as mental health and depression, and digs several layers deep into complicated family relationship. I felt it offers quite a realistic view on human relationships—and anxieties, as the title implies.

I had mixed feelings about this one.

I liked how it approached the topic of abortion from different angels, providing real knowledge and context stories. It also touched on the topic of race, but I felt that it could've been explored more.

However, the way the plot was being told backwards did not feel captivating enough. From the beginning you know how the story end with only one end left open until the last chapter. And with that one open end on my mind reading all the backstories felt like a chore. There were a couple of plot twists mixed in there, but I felt that they did not make up for the mostly “spoiled” ending.

All in all I think the back stories for the characters were well crafted, but the execution of the story was lacking.

Based on the blurb I was expecting a deep psychological novel exploring love and relationships on a deep level.

What I got was a cross between a sci-fi and something philosophical. I love a good sci-fi, but this was not it and I ended up disappointed. The book was short so I powered through just for the sake of being done with the book.

There are obscure pieces of code scattered throughout the book. As someone who writes (and reads) code for a living I can assure you that these snippets make no more sense to me than they do to you. Their purpose still puzzles me.

Some characters were introduced without enough details or sufficient background, yet the narrative moves on so confidently, I felt sure I must have missed something detrimental to the plot and had to double back. Turns out I hadn't — the author just chose to confuse me.

Some of the character interactions and relationships are crafted to be interesting and engaging, yet the main plot line with the ant is just purely weird. To me it felt like a half-hearted attempt at a sci-fi. Like the author was trying to decide between a full-fledges sci-fi and an emotional novel and ended up failing at both.

Parallel plot lines are an interesting concept when they are well crafted, such as in Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1. This novel however is an example of how to make things even more confusing.

It was not all bad. It was interesting to read the same events from the perspective of different characters, to see hhow the same physical events provoke completely different emotional reactions in different people, how they end up remembering different details or completely missing the significance of the event and the connections another person has made.

I would have liked to see more exploration into the relationships between different characters. Most of them were interesting and had potential to make a captivating novel. Different timelines having different effects on family compositions and emotional ties would have been an interesting read. And no ants or rocket ships or implants.

I did not enjoy the writing style of this book. I felt that there was a lot of side-tracking, repetitiveness and unnecessarily detailed descriptions (no need to describe a bedside glass of water as lukewarm - twice - everybody's familiar with the concept of room temperature water).

The pace of the narrative was at times numbingly slow, at times chaotic. Countless cliffhangers felt annoying: “that's when I went crazy” and then pages later “that's when I went very crazy”.

Overall I found the story very interesting, but it could've been delivered much more condensed, and instead I could've read more about recovery.