Spoilers ahead, read at your discretion.
The book and this review aren’t that deep. I don’t think it spoils the experience.
★★★☆☆
With all the winding twists and turns in the final chapters, especially once Clementine, her eldest, showed up, I immediately sensed the ending was going to be a slap in the face, a quick “that’s that.” At one point, I assume most readers clung to The Truman Show theory, that Doug, her father in-law, orchestrated the whole thing using his wealth and control to set civilization back a century or two, purely to crush his family’s progressive and skewed ideas. Yet, a random mic cover was the faintest connection we got, leaving us with nothing beyond wild chicken breasts and dirt-covered apples (they grow on trees!) to support the theory.
I wasn’t reading sci-fi, so three-quarters of the way through, I knew the ending would feel dissatisfying, like “how on earth was Burke going to justify the time-switching?!” Natalie’s final fate felt unnecessarily harsh for being unkind, craving the spotlight, and shifting her beliefs (wasn’t she a Harvard dropout?) to be a Good Christian wife and mother. She’s a mother of eight, after all! Am I crazy to think she was just a victim to her own villainy? All she did was mold herself (too) perfectly to everyone else’s expectations, only to be rewarded with house arrest?! It felt like an extreme punishment, and Shannon’s, ex producer/ college dropout, false accusations were also left hanging.
That said, I’ve accepted that the real entertainment was riding along through Natalie’s five stages of grief (except she lacked emotions when her kids got taken away, as if she knew she was unfit…?) and internal conflicts. I laughed at so many of her mental back-and-forths, swearing, self deprecation because I catch myself doing the exact same thing EVERY SINGLE F DAY.
Reviews threads I submerge into:
- says more about the writer than the subject yes yes and yes about Caleb.
- Lauren-May 7, 2026 upvoted.
- Minne-May 10, 2026 fair points 👏
The End (a gentle reminder to myself)
A moment later, I opened my eyes. We were flying, hurtling into the future, toward a world I couldn’t yet begin to imagine.
For the first time in my life, I smiled.