All This & More by Peng Shepherd

45-year-old Marsh is the lucky contender on the third season of All This and More, a reality television show that uses quantum technology to change reality, enabling them to change their past and future. Marsh never followed her dreams of becoming a lawyer, traveling, lacks a romantic relationship and was recently fired (ouch). She's given the opportunity over the course of the television season to see these alternate reality options and keep perfecting them until ultimately, she would have to pick the reality to become real in the season finale. But, is everything really in her control? It seems like other forces are impacting the choices she makes, and over the course of the episodes it becomes apparent to Marsh that something is definitely wrong, and it's up to her to figure out what before everyone she cares about's lives are changed forever.

If you could go back or forward in time and change the choices you made over the course of your life, would you? Maybe you'd get the degree you always wanted, or move to a certain place, or spend more time with a loved one before they were gone. Even temporarily to live in those realities for a small amount of time for the experience of it. Marsh has the opportunity to change and change and keep changing to make everything "perfect". The endless seeking of perfection comes with its own problems, and each reality option in the effort to fix one thing leads to unwanted consequences in something else. The saying, "too good to be true" couldn't be more accurate. There's also some interesting ethics issues on changing the lives of other people connected to Marsh without their input and awareness that would have been interesting to further explore. I'm surprised that there was no government oversight on it. That would be another interesting (and necessary, I think), aspect to add if there was a sequel.

Beyond the topic of the book itself, I initially loved the format where you choose how the story ends and the choices that Marsh makes in The Bubble (what they call the technology that lets you change reality). Each choice for something else to be changed are not entirely distinct chapters with elements and sometimes exact phrases mixed in from previous choices the reader had made before. This allows the mystery to occur, the suspicious feeling that something is not quite right with how details get mushed together. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write this type of book and get multiple storylines to make sense, and be consistent with clues in the overall mystery. I also will say that it was a fitting format for the plot to help with reader engagement and connecting with Marsh where you are making choices while Marsh also makes choices. However, loving the premise of getting to choose what happens next leads to some unique issues. 

 If you don't keep track of your choices, you end up often right back where you started reading the same thing that you did before, almost like being stuck in a time loop. What would have been very helpful was to have something like a mind map that illustrates visually what leads to what to help if you basically get lost. It is difficult to retrace your steps if you wanted to go back and read a certain section over again. It seemed like almost all of the major mystery-solving revelations occurred in this one specific section that I then could not remember where it was to read again. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what the point was in making it a choose-your-own-adventure format if the reader ends up going in circles and selecting every other choice anyway to get out. The premise and idea was excellent, but the execution lacking.The mystery itself was fairly well-written and the core revelations were foreshadowed just enough to not spoiler it but still make the truth shocking. Shepherd's talent likely lies in her mystery writing, and I likely would have enjoyed the book more without the choices as a full-blown mystery novel.

Are there other choose-your-own-adventure books you'd recommend?

Title: All This & More
Author: Peng Shepherd

Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 469
Series: No
Rating: 3 Stars
Goodreads

The Words in My Hands By Asphyxia

In a futurized (but realistic) Australian society, most people are entirely dependent on "recon", which is essentially a meal delivery service, but has medicines in the food that cure cancer and other diseases. When the food cannot come due to massive oil and gas shortages and the economy falls apart, 16-year old deaf teen Piper is faced with figuring out how to survive. When getting her old bike repaired, she meets Marley, who introduces her to sign language, a deaf community she didn't know existed, and how to grow food. Communicating with others is difficult enough, never mind the constant headaches. Facing a corrupt government oppressing freedom of speech and a right to grow their own food? Now that's something else. But Piper is finding her own power.

I grabbed this book off of the shelf at the library because I have never seen anything like it nor read a book with so much art on it. Every page is watercolored with drawings on most of them. I would have read the book no matter what the topic was, just because of how impressive the art in the book is. That alone helped to entice turning the next page in the story, to see what the art on the next page looked like! It was cool to also have the art drawn be used in the plot of book. This would be a fantastic book for someone who enjoys more so comic books than ordinary reading, or a fellow artist. I wish I could draw like that! Art can have meaning that moves people. Being deaf didn’t make her any less able to inspire a revolution/movement.  It was helpful to have capital letters versus lowercase letters for differentiating between sign language and oral dialogue.

Example of art in the book

Without the art, I'm confident I still would have read the book and liked it. The story tackles social and environmental justice, political corruption, survival, implicit biases against the deaf and hard of hearing, and finding what you stand for in the world as a teenager. With each new obstacle in her way, Piper's development as a character grew, as she discovered herself and found her voice and confidence. Part of why Piper felt so real is because the author is also deaf and poured that cultural identity and experience into the pages. 

I didn't really like Marley as a character, it felt like he more so served as a prop to escalate Piper's character development and be an introduction to the community who would shape her and take up the rebellion. That didn't bother me a lot though because I was much more focused on the dynamic between Piper and her mother. This wasn't just your ordinary rebellious mother-daughter relationship. The book added another complicated layer of trust issues where her mother is the scientist behind recon, who's company is the one controlling the government and spreading propaganda about the dangers of "wild food". On top of that, there's the issue of wanting her daughter to be normal and against learning sign language to the point where Piper felt like she had to hide. It's one of the most dynamic, complicated parent-child relationships I've read.

I wouldn't label the book as a dystopian because the scenario is true in some places around the world and will be true for others that rely on unrenewable resources. As someone passionate about sustainability, I liked the focus on growing your own food. Growing your own produce and community gardens reduces carbon footprints, improves air quality and biodiversity. Composting your own backyard, growing your own food is one thing that everyday people can do to improve the environment- crisis or not. There are also some helpful diagrams drawn in the book for anyone interested. :)

I highly recommend this book!

Title: The Words in My Hands
Author: Asphyxia
Publisher: Annick Press
Pages: 388
Series: No
Rating: 5 Stars
Goodreads

Author's cool website

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a science biography book for adults that was given to me by one of my favorite teachers. Henrietta Lacks grew up on a poor tobacco farm in Virginia, and had her first child at the age of 14 with several more over the course of her life. Her family eventually moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins. Her doctor took samples of her cancerous cells without Henrietta's consent, and she soon died at the age of 31 in 1951. These cells are the foundation for the field of virology and human genetics fields as we know it today. No human cell line can replicate like hers or share similar immortality, because of how her HPV-induced cancer resulted in genetic mutations. Her family had no idea until over 20 years later, with her 22 descendants incredibly poor and locked out of the billions being profited off buying and selling her cells for research. Today, her family has been suing research and pharmaceutical companies for share of profit.

This is not simply a book about cellular biology, or the science of virology and cancer, nor just the ethical questions to how potentially groundbreaking research is conducted and communicated, or the treatment of black Americans by healthcare systems. This book tells the life of a woman who is "the mother of modern medicine" and her family's story, faced with significant challenges like poverty, hearing loss, abuse, and the lack of transparency in their mother's death. Readers become invested in the future of the real characters. For a nonfiction book, it sure reads like a fiction one for the amount of significant detail and imagery. This is even more impressive considering many of the people featured are no longer alive. I also enjoyed the passages in the present about Rebecca's interviews and the process of writing the story. The structure of the book flipping between the past and the present would be confusing if not for the lovely division of the each chapter stating what years it describes, and Skloot did a good job of balancing staying on topic but also including several other interesting points, like the history of Johns Hopkins and commercialization of medical research, which inevitably happened although seemingly not intentional.

I also appreciated that while the author did not shy away from scientific details of the research using her cells, Rebecca mostly condensed the information into a digestible amount for those not scientifically knowledgeable or have ever taken a biology class. As someone in this field, I found the contamination of her cells all over the world a fascinating biosecurity issue, and I would highly recommend this book to anyone who does cellular or tissue research or works in the medical field. It is a shame that this book is no longer required reading; it used to be in one of the 100 level biology courses, but not anymore and the books just sat collecting dust with all the other formerly used textbooks (which is an entirely separate issue on the impact of digital media on reading and learning).

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Author: Rebecca Skloot

Publisher: Broadway Paperbacks

Pages: 382

Series: No

Rating: 5 Stars

Goodreads