Blake Crouch has a way of writing these mind-bender novels that are tough to put down. I loved Dark Matter and couldn't wait to read Recursion, which tells the stories of Barry Sutton and Helena Smith -- on multiple timelines -- as their lives are affected by a chair that can, using memories, send them back to another point in time.

To be able to go back and do something differently sounds great, especially when you consider the disasters that could have been avoided had someone, somewhere, acted differently.

But Barry and Helena quickly learn that going back isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sometimes the things that happened on the original timeline still end up happening later. So at the same time that there's this theme of humans playing God running through the book, there's also the flip side of that, in which they discover that they're in the hands of fate.

The only part that I thought dragged on just a little too long was toward the end when they are constantly resetting and arriving back at the same moment in April 2019. I think because there was so much repetition there, I struggled a little to be excited about what the next iteration would bring.

The great thing about this book is that while it is largely science fiction and there's definitely a lot of science-speak happening, it's not written in a way that would be over the reader's head were they not to be part of that world. I'm not a science person and I don't typically read science fiction, but this was written in a way that didn't lose me, but kept my brain working... all without being too on-the-nose.