"If, Then" and the power of the slow burn

“There are an infinite number of possible worlds inside God’s mind, but only one actual world, which God chose as the most perfect of all possibilities.” (From "If, Then" by Kate Hope Day)

“If, Then” by Kate Hope Day is an eerie, beautifully written novel set in a small town in Oregon. In the shadow of a dormant volcano, ominously named Broken Mountain, a few of the folks in the town begin to experience hallucinations. It’s not immediately clear what these hallucinations are supposed to represent, but they’re disturbing enough to shake the characters who experience them into action. For Samara, who has just experienced her mother’s death, she sees her mother wandering around the neighborhood. Cass, a new mother at a crossroads between raising a child and pursuing her career, sees herself pregnant again. Ginny, an overworked surgeon, sees herself in a relationship with her coworker, Edith, instead of with her husband. Mark, a scientist studying animal behavior, sees himself paranoid, homeless and living in the woods.

The hallucinations prey on each person differently, causing them to reconsider the trajectories of their lives. Setting the story in a remote location only added to the individual characters’ isolation and the atmosphere of quiet panic throughout the novel.

Kate Hope Day has a knack for writing tense, domestic scenes, then adding some sort of mundane, yet terrifying occurrence to scare one of the characters. This book was genuinely spooky, and the characters were meticulously crafted, so not only was I scared, but I was invested. I wanted to put the book down, but I couldn’t look away.

The books I’ve been reading lately are on either end of two extremes. “If, Then” was slow-paced, the cast of characters was limited and the time frame of the novel was very short. I’ve also recently finished Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy ("The Bear and the Nightingale," "The Girl in the Tower" and "Winter of the Witch"), which was sprawling, took place over years, but was fast-paced with a lot of Russian characters with multiple, confusing nicknames. I’m down for adventure/fantasy novels, but I almost always get hooked on a slow burn. I’m trying to decide which type of book I enjoy more, but I think it’s one of those things that depends on my mood.

I was eternally grateful to receive “If, Then” from Random House Publishing Group on NetGalley. I’m always glad when a publisher takes a chance on my little sliver of a blog on a minuscule corner of the Internet. "If, Then" will be published on March 12, 2019.

Other slow burn books I’ve read this year
“The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky” by Jana Casale
“A Place For Us” by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Sprawling epics I’ve read this year
The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden
The Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas

You can see what I'm reading now on my Goodreads list, but take it with a grain of salt. I put books that have a deadline on there, but some books that I want to read but don't have a deadline have been sitting there for months. Not the greatest method of organizing books, I know.