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The voice of Little Bee, a refugee from Nigeria, is charming and compelling. The voice of her counterpoint, Sarah, is less so. This novel, told in chapters that alternate between Little Bee's and Sarah's points of view, tells how their lives intersect.

Maybe I liked Little Bee because she is "exotic," and therefore I don't really know what her life has been like; because of this foreignness, perhaps anything author Chris Cleave says seems right. On the other hand, Sarah, a young British magazine editor and mother, is someone I could know--and yet, she seems less "real." Yes, she's going through some personal traumas, but none so horrific as what Little Bee has experienced.

The novel started strong, but its power got diluted as events progressed. I almost put down this book after one of the refugees hangs herself early on. I almost quit again after we learn how Little Bee and Sarah (and Sarah's husband, Andrew) met in Nigeria. I decided to stick with it, just to see how Cleave depicted the triumph of the human spirit. I mean, honestly, after describing such tragedy, isn't such a triumph just about required? Well, the triumph was muted.

The voice of Little Bee, a refugee from Nigeria, is charming and compelling. The voice of her counterpoint, Sarah, is less so. This novel, told in chapters that alternate between Little Bee's and Sarah's points of view, tells how their lives intersect.

Maybe I liked Little Bee because she is "exotic," and therefore I don't really know what her life has been like; because of this foreignness, perhaps anything author Chris Cleave says seems right. On the other hand, Sarah, a young British magazine editor and mother, is someone I could know--and yet, she seems less "real." Yes, she's going through some personal traumas, but none so horrific as what Little Bee has experienced.

The novel started strong, but its power got diluted as events progressed. I almost put down this book after one of the refugees hangs herself early on. I almost quit again after we learn how Little Bee and Sarah (and Sarah's husband, Andrew) met in Nigeria. I decided to stick with it, just to see how Cleave depicted the triumph of the human spirit. I mean, honestly, after describing such tragedy, isn't such a triumph just about required? Well, the triumph was muted.

I didn't see the film, and after reading this book I don't need or want to.

What a sad story. What sad characters. Nicely written, yet emotionally distant.

Enjoyable time-travel story. The setup in the first half was compelling: we are introduced to Chase (a survivor of the 9/11 attacks on the towers in New York) and Leonard (a suave time-traveling scientist), and we realize that they exist in different, but equivalent, worlds. Parallel worlds.

In his attempts to explain space-time and alternate universes in a pop fiction/lite kinda way, author Will Entrekin does a fair amount of name-dropping (like Greene and Kaku--Brian and Michio, presumably). He also give us tiny slivers of quantum theory.

Chase (and Cassie, who appears to be the actual brains of the pair but plays only a secondary role) use a device invented by Chase's father to alter the direction of time. In Leonard's world, time travel is initiated by entering the Schrodinger Chamber. (My brain doesn't wrap around all of the quantum concepts but I do get a kick out of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.)

The time-traveling kicks into gear in the second half of the book, and that's where things got (unintentionally) funny.

In order to enjoy the story at all, I had to suspend lots of disbelief. In the part of the story that takes place in the weeks following 9/11, federal agents question a scientist about his ties to al Qaeda. Really? The agents would disclose this kind of information to a suspect, let alone in front of the suspect's family, in his own home?

There was a Calvin Klein joke stolen from Back to the Future, and a backhanded shout-out to Stephen King ("The hand of God has only ever intervened when Stephen King hasn't known how to end a novel"). There was also an element of Groundhog Day when Chase finds himself doing the same thing over and over, trying to alter the outcome.

Best (worst) of all, there was the ridiculousness of dressing in sheets from Target (!) to prepare for a trip back to the days of Jesus. And the inanity of Chase speaking to Roman soldiers using his law-clerk Latin: "Nolo contendere. Pax vobiscum," he tells them. The episode covers a serious historical event, but the way our modern-day protagonist interacted was just laughable.

I started to suspect that Chase was experiencing 9/11 survivor's guilt or post-traumatic stress, rather than wrinkles in the space-time continuum.

Meanwhile, Leonard, a supposedly sharp guy, seems perplexed by a world parallel to his own. He is convinced that the "other" world is the alternate, and his is the "real." What ego-centrism, what time-and-place centrism he exhibits!

The author gives us an entertaining summary about the recent history of a world alternate to ours (Bill Clinton is Prime Minister of the North American Union; George W. Bush has ties to Saudi Arabian terrorists).

Overall, this was a quick, easy read.

Really not bad for a free Kindle download.

But, like most Kindle freebies I've read, this one could have used some copyediting. There were missing commas and apostrophes, trite phrasing ("a fire beguiled me to absorb its warmth" -- really??), odd usage ("rolly polly" rather than "roly poly"), and flat-out errors ("we poured over the files").

Griping aside, this was a quick, easy read set in the ski town of Park City. The book opens on the slopes but never returns there. The heroine, PI Sloane Monroe, is spunky (of course), has an intelligent, sensitive boyfriend (ooooh), and the perfect little dog (awwww).

There were two other books in the series included in the Kindle freebie, which I may get to some day.

Got my copy autographed by author Chad Harbach at Vroman's in Pasadena. Harbach was influenced by David Foster Wallace's [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165604485s/6759.jpg|3271542] and [b:Moby Dick|153747|Moby-Dick|Herman Melville|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327940656s/153747.jpg|2409320].