I wanted to like this book. The premise is interesting, and I thought it would be full of twists and unsettling moments, but a lot of the time, it just seemed confusing. It does have a very unreliable narrator, so that could be part of it, but I struggled to follow the story at times and had a hard time keeping track of who was who and what was actually happening. I went into it expecting something with a Twilight Zone vibe, but finished the book feeling bewildered and a little bit cheated out of time I could have spent on something better. I did like a lot of the ideas presented in the book, and the possibilities of what it could have been, so I can see myself trying something else by this author in the future. ( )

There is the supernatural at work in this book. Abigail, 45, encounters a younger version of herself at 22, who goes by the name of A. Abigail tries to warn A of the problems ahead. For me there was just too much going on to make a cohesive story line. ( )

Abigail is on her way home from work one evening when she sees a young woman on the sidewalk. She's wearing the same pink thrift store coat that Abigail wore in her early twenties and when Abigail gets out of her taxi for a closer look, she realizes that she's seeing herself, twenty years younger. This glimpse of her past sends her into a closer look at her current life - then she was preparing to go to art school with the intention of living solely for her art, but now she's the art designer for a pharmaceutical company, deciding on the exact shade of lavender to use in the packaging for a new drug, or working on the precise shades of pink to use for a brochure illustration of the digestive system. As her sightings of her former self become more frequent and she begins to interact with her, her life begins to spin out of control, the carefully constructed security she's built become less satisfying. At the same time, one of her sons is becoming involved in an antifa group, putting Abigail's values into question and putting her in the path of a seemingly nice police detective.

I'm not sure what exactly was going on for much of this and the possible explanations trotted out at the end of the novel weren't convincing to me. But there's no question that the author had me reading as fast as I could, trying to keep up with the twists and the rapid pace of events. And despite my finding some of the central events utterly unbelievable, this didn't stop me from enjoying the wild ride this novel took me on, which is to say that Immergut has constructed a clever bunch of inter-connected plots and kept them all from falling apart, resulting in a novel that is more entertaining than most. ( )