The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

This should have been great and was just okay. I really like the kalachakra ‘Replay” aspect of it and just did not care for the cat and mouse game, which felt like a mediocre spy novel.

I'm a sucker for stories where the main characters is stuck in a time loop. Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow stand out, but this one took it to an entirely new level. The title itself is a giveaway for the time loop – an entire lifetime. The concept of replaying your entire life sounds interesting, but the complications that come up when you (and perhaps others) can do this were problems I hadn't seen explored in Sci-Fi before.

Great pacing until Russia where, for me, it felt a little slow but picks up again after that.

Worth reading, but didn't live up to it's clever premise, for me. I enjoyed the quick little vignettes about some of Harry's lives that weren't examined very deeply, and about the lives of some of the others, and I thought the overall structure was interesting, but I couldn't get invested in Harry, or his nemesis, or each of their quests; this meant getting through the second half was a bit of a slog.