Recursion by Blake Crouch.

"An exhilarating, mind bending, heart wrenching ride and a book that makes you stop and think that if you were given the chance to go back to an exact moment in your life and fix one mistake, or do something you should have done but didn't, would you? This was an awesome read."

5 Stars

Pros: The idea that we are just a massive deposit of our memories, the small and big moments that make u our lives is intriguing/It really makes you think, that if you had the chance to go back and fix one mistake in your life, would you do it? Or would you think about the possible consequences? 

Cons: It was definitely trippy and hard to comprehend at times/The third part, though necessary, got a bit repetitive at times, but it led into an ending that was both perfect and open ended. 

Full Review: 

When I first read Crouch's Dark Matter, I was hooked. He has an easy prose, compelling characters and his plot seems to unravel in ways that are always easy to understand. So when I picked up Recursion, I was eager and excited to see if he had managed the same. And I'm glad to say that he did. 

Recursion is a really hard book to explain but trust me, if you decide to give it a shot, I think you'll enjoy it. Essentially, Helena Smith is a brilliant Neuroscientist who is attempting to create a completely immersive therapy that can reactivate memories in the brains of people with Alzheimers Disease. She's given the opportunity of a lifetime when a rich entrepreneur takes an interest in her research and hires her. But what she manages to do and how her employer manages to use the "memory chair" as its termed, is not what she had in mind. 

Barry Sutton is a New York Police Officer who's the first responder of a suicide. He tries to talk the woman off the ledge, at the same time feeing greatly unsettled at the fact that she has False Memory Syndrome or FMS. A sickness that has only recently popped up in the United States and there's still not much known. But what is known is that one day a person wakes up and is flooded with memories of having lived a completely different life than the one they're currently living. This woman, Anna Voss Peters, claims to have been married, to have had had a son, an entirely different life and the fact that, that life may not have been real, is too much for her to handle. 

After his failure to save Anna Voss Peters from committing suicide, Sutton starts to dig deeper into cases of FMS and what he discovers will create an extraordinarily complex, interwoven, cause and effect, memory/time travel/alternate realities black hole that the reader is thrown into, but truth be told, I didn't want to get out. I was hooked from the very start and though at the end it became a little bit repetitive, the ending, in and of itself was both satisfying and also open ended but that, in and of itself is what made it so perfect. 

I haven't read a book this quickly in a long, long time. So it was refreshing to be eager and excited to get some quiet time and sit down and read. It really makes you think too, that if you were given the opportunity to go back and fix one mistake in your life, would you do it? Or would you hesitate and be able to think of the thousands upon thousands of ramifications that fixing that one mistake would cause not just in your life, but in everyone else's lives around you? It was a great read and I would recommend this book to anyone.