This is an odd one to write about because while I enjoyed the process of reading it and found the story kept me engaged, enough to rate it 4 stars, I don’t think it’s going to be very memorable for me, and it was hard at first for me to even articulate why I liked it so much.
So, what I liked: The short chapters keep the story moving, even though we’re jumping back and forward in time as the novel follows Tom, who has been alive for over 400 years because he has a medical condition that dramatically slows the aging process, a condition that a number of other people around the world have. It’s also a love story about Tom and his wife Rose, who died in the 1600s, a loss he hasn’t recovered from, made more complicated by the daughter he had with Rose who shares his condition, and Tom has been searching for her for hundreds of years. I couldn’t really tell what the book was leading up to, and I wanted to see what happened. There were also mysteries that kept me going like how one character seems to know Tom when he’s certain they’ve never met, or wanting details about how the Albatross Society (a society that tries to protect albas, as these long-lived people call themselves) operates.
There are also some really quotable passages. Two in particular that stood out: The first is Tom’s description of Rose: “. . . a glint of mischief to her that played around with the corners of her mouth, as if a smile was always in the process of wanting to emerge, but being tightly regulated by some disapproving authority inside her mind.” The second was an interaction with a woman Tom works with in the present day: “‘The world makes it very hard not to be a prick’ . . . I have never been insulted so delicately.”
Probably the main thing that kept this from being a standout book is that I never really felt connected to Tom. He is very focused on the past and has frequent headaches when the present reminds him of the past . . . which is basically all the time. He also name-drops actual people from history that he met, like Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and describes his interactions with them, and somehow I found this to be the least interesting part of the novel.
This is the second book I’ve read by Matt Haig. While he seems to be hit or miss for a lot of people, I do like his books. And I liked this one quite a bit, although I’m aware I sound somewhat equivocating. I plan to read some of the others he’s written—but maybe from the library because I don’t like them enough to own them.