Rating: DNF @ 18%. 3 stars for the bits I read
This was an ARC. Thank you to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press. My opinions are entirely my own. This book is on sale now.
In recent years, legacy sequels, coming out several decades after the previous movie, have become popular. Some are surprisingly great, like Creed and Blade Runner 2049, while others make you wonder why they exist in the first place (The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Practical Magic 2: Family Legacy, to name two that I watched over the summer). Life Out of Order comes out 23 years after the mega-successful The Time Traveller's Wife and, as such, I think it's fair to compare it to a legacy sequel. Unfortunately, I can't really tell you whether it's a legacy sequel like the first examples I mentioned, or the second, since I didn't even make it a quarter of the way through the book.
This time, we follow Alba DeTamble, Clare and Henry's daughter. Like her father, she has chrono-displacement syndrome, which means she is involuntarily thrown back (or sometimes forward) in time to any point in her own lifetime. It makes life very difficult for her, and those close to her.
According to Goodreads, I haven’t actually read The Time Traveller's Wife since 2011, although I remember really liking it. I rated it five stars. Unfortunately, I don’t remember that much about it anymore, and I no longer remember how I reacted to the fact that the characters are often so jumbled in each other’s timelines. 2011 was long before smartphones and social media, the scourge of reading stamina and deep concentration. All I know is that when I tried to read Life Out of Order now, the fact that every chapter starts with information about the various character’s ages and what year the plot is currently taking place in, got very confusing very fast. It doesn’t help that the book is clearly set in a depressing alternate reality, where society is a lot more fascist than it currently is, and there seems to be something rather cataclysmic coming later in Alba’s life. I kept putting it down and then reluctantly picking it back up again. Sadly, I DNF-d it at 18%. It may be a perfectly good book. It just wasn’t the right one for me at this point in time.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
