Books I've read: Again Again

This was a quirky, fun read about the various different ways any given moment could potentially play out.

Set over a single summer, the book follows Adelaide Buchwald over the course of a summer she is spending at the boarding school she attends during term time and where her father teaches.  She's spending the summer months taking care of faculty dogs while their owners are on vacation and recovering from a broken heart and a family tragedy which has left her family literally and physically torn apart.

When she meets Jack, she thinks he might be a distraction from the break-up she's still hurting from.  As the summer unfolds, so do a variety of different possibilities, each springing from a real-life event, and offering a different scenario.  In some, Jack and Adelaide fall in love; in others he's less interested and in others, he has a girlfriend already.

As Adelaide lives each reality in turn, she learns about love and possibility and starts to piece together the fragments of her shattered life.

I enjoyed this one.  I like the idea that there are a multitude of different ways any moment might unfold and exploring the ways these different scenarios can change the future.  When I started reading, I thought the various different possibilities might be confusing, but it was easy to follow what was really happening and what the alternative realities were.

I liked Adelaide as a character too, and really appreciated that what her family's problem is was revealed slowly.  I had assumed something very different, so when it was revealed, it surprised me.

So I'd recommend this one.  It's a quick, easy read, but has a little more substance and thought-provoking content than some.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

From the New York Times bestselling author of We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud comes a complex novel about acceptance, forgiveness, self-discovery, and possibility, as a teenage girl attempts to regain some sense of normalcy in her life after a family crisis and a broken heart.
If you could live your life again, what would you do differently?

After a near-fatal family catastrophe and an unexpected romantic upheaval, Adelaide Buchwald finds herself catapulted into a summer of wild possibility, during which she will fall in and out of love a thousand times—while finally confronting the secrets she keeps, her ideas about love, and the weird grandiosity of the human mind.

A raw, funny story that will surprise you over and over, Again Again gives us an indelible heroine grappling with the terrible and wonderful problem of loving other people.