Marnie Wooderson

I’ve not read anything by Picoult before, but I really enjoyed this. I don’t feel that the academic content gets in the way of the story: the themes of death, the way we view it and fate plus the choices we make shaping who we become, are all tied in with the Egyptology and quantum physics. Dawn doesn’t always make what might be seen as morally good choices, but I feel that they are all believably human. Brian and Wyatt are perhaps a little subverted to representations of passionate excitement versus comfortable security, but Dawn’s dilemma is still compelling. The non-chronological time-line is not too taxing until the end, where the question of when the plane crash happened and what the significance of this is, takes some thinking about. At first, I was a little disappointed by the ending, but it ties in with the Schrödinger’s cat idea, that both endings are possible until one is revealed.