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Book Reviewed by:In this funny and poignant novel, two strangers learn that their soul mate might be both as close as breath and as distant as a star, from British Fantasy Award recipient Sarah Lotz.
Bee thinks she has everything: a successful business repurposing wedding dresses, and friends who love and support her. She's given up on finding love, but that's fine. There's always Tinder. Nick thinks he has nothing: his writing career has stalled after early promise and his marriage is on the rocks, but that's fine. There's always gin. So when one of Nick's emails, a viciously funny screed intended for a non-paying client, accidentally pings into Bee's inbox, they decide to keep the conversation going. After all, they never have to meet.
But the more they get to know each other, the more Bee and Nick realize they want to. They both notice strange pop culture or political references that crop up in their correspondence, but nothing odd enough to stop Bee and Nick for falling hard for each other. But when their efforts to meet in real life fail spectacularly, Bee and Nick discover that they're actually living in near-identical but parallel worlds. With a universe between them, Bee and Nick will discover how far they'll go to beat impossible odds.
The Impossible Us weighs in at well over 500 pages, but the narrative really flies by, in part because a significant portion is composed of Bee and Nick's email exchanges, which are pithy and frequently very funny. The remainder unfolds in short chapters alternating between the two characters' perspectives. Lotz excels at developing a plausible love story, and at exploring the more speculative elements of the plot without getting bogged down in explanations. The story is sure to open readers' hearts and minds to imagining a world, or worlds, of infinite possibilities...continued
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In The Impossible Us, Nick becomes connected with a group calling themselves the Berenstain Society. Their name is inspired by one of the most famous examples of what's popularly known as the Mandela effect. The Mandela effect, according to Medical News Today, "describes a situation in which a person or a group of people have a false memory of an event." The name was coined in 2009 after self-described paranomal consultant Fiona Broome noted on her blog that not only she, but also many other people, had vivid memories of Nelson Mandela dying in a South African jail when he was imprisoned during the apartheid period in the 1980s. Mandela, of course, did not die in prison; he went on to serve as the president of South Africa after his release...
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If you liked The Impossible Us, try these:
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
by Victoria E. Schwab
Published 2023
Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Fiction Award
In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab's genre-defying tour de force.
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Published 2022
Klara and the Sun is a magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro--author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.
Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne
An absolutely addictive read, perfect for fans of Katie Khan. I was swept away by Bee and Nick's impossible love story...and I was utterly hooked from the start. A story that is funny, sweet and full of twists that made it genuinely unputdownable.
