34639452“Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Source Format Pages Publisher Genre Publication Date
Amazon ebook 342  Macmillan SciFi Thriller August 11th, 2016

Amazon tells me I bought the book 7 months ago… blimey… and it would probably have been another 7 months before I read it if it wasn’t for Nicki @ SecretLibrary who suggested a buddy read. Thanks, Nicki- it was most certainly the little kick I needed to finally read this book and it was a joy to constantly catch up with you to exchange thoughts as we went through the book! 😉

Everyone, pop on over to Nicki’s to say hello and check out her review 🙂

The older I get, the less I understand.

Dark Matter… Oh, boy, Dark Matter, you were the talk of the blogosphere.. You rode into town with your scifi element and thrill and won over everyone’s hearts… I mean, you popped the cherry for many a reader who hadn’t read scifi-anything before. That’s something! Now the hype has died down, I hear a bit less about you but when I do it’s mostly people saying- “Ahhh, I really need to read this book!”

I think due to the hype surrounding this book having lodged itself in my mind I did go into reading it with some high expectations. Most of those expectations were met.

What I truly loved about this book was its source of inspiration- the many worlds theory and Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Fascinating! Mighty fascinating! Love this stuff to bits! Even though I failed my physics/chemistry/maths throughout my education years 😀 And it’s all mind blowing the more I think about these topics… I mean, I completely love what Crouch did here- essentially he explained complicated theories in simple terms- through storytelling. And the many worlds theory has been something of a niggle at the back of my head when thinking about all things life and choices but I never actually knew the theory existed until I read this book, so there! I can name it now, explore it and have interesting inner dialogues with myself!

I did not know what to expect in terms of plot and characters… I was pleased to be hooked into the story from pretty much paragraph one and when I thought perhaps I and Nicki wouldn’t have catch ups that often, we ended up DMing each other rather frequently! That was fun! It was great to try and guess what was going to happen next, chapter after chapter. I think we both had plenty of visions in our heads on how it was all going to play out or how we wanted the story to go… Personally, I got a bit anxious because the closer to the end of the book I got, the more gargantuan I was expecting the final ‘big bang’ (tee-hee!) to be… The conclusion certainly satisfied me! Although I do have questions about what happened to all those… *cough* …’people‘!

What I didn’t that much like, or well, what kind of took away from the complete enjoyment for me was the occasional sappiness. I get it: life = love! But man, there were some serious sappy moments in this book where I just rolled my eyes and thought: Ahh, you little sappy sap, Jason!

I have to admit, though- isn’t it always the case that when the status quo is shaken and stirred, we suddenly realize that what we’ve had all along, and what we’ve been taking for granted seems a lot more valuable to us. I do think that little piece of intimacy and emotional side of it was there to please the wider group of readers, HOWEVER, it also, in my mind, has its role to highlight the differences in between the Family Man Jason versus the Scientist Jason.

In the end… I have to admit, I enjoyed what Crouch accomplished. Part thriller/part scifi, centred around the ‘old as man’ question of love and happiness.

So, the only thing for me to do is ask you: Are YOU happy with your life? I would recommend reading this book to help you visualise all the different ways your life could change and whether what you currently have in your life suffices for happiness and peace. Dark Matter definitely made me think!

Dark Matter on Goodreads | Amason UK | USA