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2.5 stars, rounded down. Outlier alert!
Warning: if you dislike reading about the pandemic, this is not the book for you. There's a major section dealing with a pandemic.

I was really looking forward to this read, as I adored everything about The Dreamers. Unfortunately, this book just did not live up to my expectations.

I overall liked the premise, and even though it is a very slow burn, I initially had buy in because I wanted to see where things were going. In the end though, it just didn't deliver a cohesive enough story for me to get behind it. And then the ultimate ending made me round down, because of the weird ick factor it gave me.

The book is told from two perspectives. That of Dr. Henry Byrd, a psychiatrist, and the journal entries of Jane O., his patient who comes to him after experiencing some fugue state episodes.

We don't get to experience much in real time. It's a book full of telling us what happened and I felt like an outsider most of the time. I didn't connect with either of the main characters at all, and felt like they were both performing for each other rather than really trying to get to the heart of what was going on with Jane. I had zero buy in about Henry's "feelings" which came out of absolutely nowhere.

This was just not a book for me. There wasn't enough sci-fi to make it compelling (Like there was with The Dreamers) but there also wasn't enough of anything else to make it interesting without the sci-fi elements. I'll still give this author another chance because I do like her writing overall.

I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book, all opinions are my own.