The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

I usually get a headache from trying to understand time travel stories, I remember watching Doctor Who and having to lie down from thinking too hard about the Doctor and River Song's movement through time. So of course, I wound up trying to think too hard about how time works in this book, but I always feel there's a certain poetry to tangled time narratives, so I enjoyed it at the same time. I don't think this book was particularly well-written or innovative, but it just kept me reading because it was a very entertaining and easy read. I'd say it was more promising than well-executed; some parts are well-written and there are interesting ideas, but it's all a bit of a mess. I felt like no part was fully flushed out, because the author was rushing to get too much in there. I thought the time travel or parallel universe element in this book was pretty original, but that might be because I don't read many books like this and have little to compare it to. I think what I liked best was the way it considers all aspects of 20th century history from different perspectives and from different countries, while I feel like most books get stuck in one country and one perspective. It seems to bear out what I always feel; that the more you know, the harder it is to believe in anything or be wholeheartedly devoted to any cause. Some parts also had a really nice, dry humour. I would have really liked there to be more emotional depth, and I found the style in which it's written deeply irritating. It uses that really-short-sentences-for-maximum-impact style, sometimes with just one word in a paragraph to really get the reader's attention. I find that very obnoxious, and when the prose got more bulky (longer sentences, more complex paragraphs) I thought the writing was much stronger.