Time. Time is weird. It dilates, sometimes creating chasms, other times seeming to defy a gulf of years, Jay Hosking's novel reminds us that if it's "not nice to fool with Mother Nature " then it's positively dangerous to mess with Father Time.
Our main character is pretty much a regular guy just trying to have a life and put his difficult upbringing into the past.
He is at a crossroads of sorts, a time when many paths are possible,
We have all heard about the implications coming from quantum physics that suggest the possibility of multiple universes.
If a subatomic particle conceivably exists in more than one place at one time, then it's possible that big collections of such particles like us might have similar possibilities.
Our character is buffeted by these ideas but is just trying to make his way through, He reminds me of a noir character who isn't as concerned so much with solving the mystery as he is with just surviving.
In this way Hosking presents fascinating ideas without ever getting bogged down,
The format of the book cleverly enhances the ideas in it, This is a well thought out in this beautifully realized book, A young man's quest to find his missing sister will catapult him into a dangerous labyrinth of secrets in this provocative, genrebending, and pageturning debut.
After several years of drifting between school and gonowhere jobs, a young man is drawn back into the big city of his youth.
The magnet is his beloved older sister, Grace: always smart and charismatic even when she was rebelling, and always his hero.
Now she is a promising graduate student in psychophysics and the centre of a group of friends who take "Little Brother" into their fold, where he finds camaraderie, romance, and even a decent job.
But it soon becomes clear that things are not well with Grace, Always acerbic, she now veers into sudden rages that are increasingly directed at her adoring boyfriend, John, who is also her fellow researcher.
When Grace disappears, and John shortly thereafter, the narrator makes an astonishing discovery in their apartment: a box big enough to crawl inside, a lab rat, and a note that says This is the only way back for us.
Soon he embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a pursuit that forces him to question time and space itself, and ultimately toward a perilous confrontation at the very limits of imagination.
This kinetic novel catapults the classic noir plot of a woman gone missing into thest century city, where socalled reality crashes into speculative science in a novel reminiscent of Danielewski's House of Leaves.
Three Years with the Rat is simultaneously a mindtwisting mystery that plays with the very nature of time and the story of a young man who must face the dangerously destructive forces we all carry within ourselves.
SO weird and I hated how cryptic and self righteous it was at first but it kind of grew on me by the end If you asked me to list five things about the main character though I literally couldn't I don't even know his name lmao Im sorry but this book had the bad luck to be the one I read before ACOWAR came out so I went through it pretty fast, but from what I can tell ,t his story was pretty much all over the place, maybe is one of those books that you need to sit down and calmly read.
The story meddles with physic aspects, philosophical question and weak characters, . . not a good mixture. But there were glimpses where the story shines and the intricacies of the story are actually a plus, Maybe I didn't like it as much because it reminded me too much of "house of leaves" which I didn't like, but if you did then this book is for you.
Quite an impressive debut novel! What starts as a good story that jumps back and forth between three years in the narrator's life, takes a impressive jump into the surreal as the explanation for his sister's disappearance becomes apparent.
When Blake Crouch calls your work "mindwarping" you are probably doing something right, A neuroscience P. h. D this really pays off with his attention to detail and love of lab rats, Jay Hosking's fiction debut finds a college drop out, his scientist sister, and their doomed romantic partners, in an increasingly complex Toronto.
For fans of: "hey wait what" Sibling strife, and tenacious, unnamed , largely incompetent protagonists,
Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for free ebook!in exchange for honest opinion, Știți genul acela de filme din care dacă te duciminute până la baie și te întorci nu mai înțelegi nimic Sau genul acela de seriale din care dacă pierzi un episod, de asemenea nu mai înțelegi nimic Ei bine, există și genul acesta de cărți, care îți solicită atenția și concentrarea la maximum și care te obligă să le citești cap coadă neîntrerupt sau să recitești anumite fraze sau fragmente ca să nu pierzi firul acțiunii.
Exact genul acesta de carte este Trei ani în labirint, Ai clipit șiai pierdut faza, ai sărit un rând și ai căzut în gol, La propriu. Pentru că în această carte timpul și spațiul sunt alunecoase, Te întorci de la un an la altul de atâtea ori încât nu mai știi pe ce lume ești, în care an, în care realitate, cine e nebun, cine e real, cine ascunde secretul.
Am ținut foarte greu pasul, în primul rând pentru că am fost nevoită să citesc fracționat, De multe ori am întors paginile și mam dus înapoi să văd în ce an sunt și să înțeleg de ce nu se mai leagă evenimentele.
Ma "furat" deseori "peisajul" și ma dus cu gândul la Lost, la Fringe sau la Shutter Island, Cunoscătorii vor știi la ce mă refer, Sau poate că nu. Eu încă analizez și tot îmi dă puțin cu virgulă,
A fost puțin ciudat, Altfel decât ceea ce citesc de obicei, dar nu mia displăcut, Mia plăcut conceptul. Cred că mă atrage de fapt ideea de univers paralel, de alte vieți de care habar navem, dar la care ni se oferă acces la un moment dat.
Trei ani în labirint e o poveste despre căutare și regăsire, despre un pic de nebunie și despre "cealaltă parte"o buclă temporală în care te poți reinventa de un infinit de ori.
Recomand pasionaților genului,
Recenzia completa:
sitelink ro/treianiin There's the shell of something good here, Hoskings' ideas are interesting and intellectually stimulating in that speculative fiction mindfuck kind of way, but they're just not fully developed enough to be satisfying.
I don't mind being confounded by a book of this naturetypically when time travel and multiple universes are involved that's to be expectedbut I need to be able to make some sense out of it.
The writing isn't bad for a debut, It's a quick, engaging read, But the pacing and character development leave a lot to be desired,
I get what the author was going for with this, I appreciate it for its melancholy, for its meditations on solipsism, The execution just didn't do justice to the concept, Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography cclapcenter, com. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP it is not being reprinted illegally.
The promotional material for Jay Hosking's Three Years with the Rat claims that the novel is "reminiscent of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves," but as typical with this kind of stuff, that's simply a lie in fact the one and only thing the two books have in common is that they both feature a space that's bigger on the inside than on the outside.
Other than that, this book consists of not much more than a fairly pedestrian comingofage tale, plotted with the immaturity of a Young Adult novel and featuring dialogue that badly suffers from Joss Whedon Syndrome, a book that hits all the notes you would expect from such a story boy moves to Big City, boy makes new group of friends, boy gets into first serious romantic relationship, boy breaks up from first serious romantic relationship, only with a metafictional element holding the story spine together, in that it's the boy's older sister who convinces him to move there, and she and her boyfriend are both scientists who are working on some kind of shadowy project that supposedly supersedes the normal laws of space and time.
That's led St, Martin's Press to unwisely market this as a sciencefiction novel, or at least a literary novel with strongly sciencefictional overtones thus the House of Leaves comparison on the dust jacket but actual SF fans like myself will be disappointed by Three Years with the Rat, not only because the science part is dished out in such a poorly paced, haphazard way smart readers can essentially glean everything they're trying to do in chapter, then the rest of the novel is a series of flashbacks where Hosking tries to slowly reveal the very information he fully showed in the first chapter, but because the eventual "science" that's revealed sounds literally like something a stoned undergraduate would come up with after a bullshit session in the dorm with their buddy, then afterwards decide would make for a good subject off which to base an entire novel.
That's a huge problem here, because there's nothing compelling left once you discount the disappointing concept at the center of the book and when combined with the immature writing style that's clearly being presented as something for grownups, that makes for a book that's hard to recommend and kind of a slog to actually read.
I'm tacking on a few extra points to its score today anyway, as an acknowledgement that teens and Whedon fans will undoubtedly like this more than I did but make no mistake, despite what St.
Martin's is trying to peddle here, Primer this ain't,
Out of: ,
Joss Whedon Syndrome: When dialogue supposedly meant for grownups is written in an overly twee and flippant style, which some people apparently like for some unfathomable reason, but for me is like fingernails down a chalkboard.
"Dude, you know how, like, time seems to stand still when you're waiting in line at the grocery store What if it actually does" "Awww, duuuude.
" "And what if, like, you could control that time speed by putting six mirrors together directly across from each other in a cube, so that they're, like, all infinitely mirroring each other" "Awww, duuuuuddde!" "And what if, like, what if you sat in the middle of that mirror cube, and like your entire past ceased to exist because of it, so then you could go back to your exgirlfriend and undo all the dick moves that made her break up with you the first time" "Stop, dude, stop! YOU'RE FREAKING ME OUT, DUDE!!!" "This is the only way back for us.
"
Although it says I read, "Three Years with the Rat" in three days, I basically read it in one day total.
This book had me hooked from the moment I opened it, Reason why you ask I didn't have a clue what was going on, Therefore, I kept reading just so I could try and figure it out, I loved that aspect of it! This book takes you on a crazy journey that has you questioning time itself.
The narrator who's real name is never really told but is called other things like, "dead beat brother," "little brother," "danger," and "scruffy" is on a mission to figure out whether his sister and her boyfriend are dead or maybe they are still alive I'm not exactly sure if in the end I truly understood what happened.
I had to reread several parts because it jumps back and forth between the years ofand,and I did get a little lost at times.
But did that really matter since, "There are just some things that are outside of comprehension, even if we can quantify them.
At some point, science becomes magic, " If you like trippy stories that have you questioning reality then I recommend this book, I really really really wanted to like this story, But I didn't. I was able to follow along for the most part but there were times when I really felt like I missed the point.
This book had an interesting idea but I think it failed when it came to execution, There was really nothing I loved about this novel other than the reference to different places in Toronto, of course.
I didn't like any of the characters, They fell flat and had a one dimensional personality that was hard to love, I simply had no connection and that led me to not care about the story at all, There were times when the story was moving along but I had no clue what was going on it made me wish the author would explain his thoughts a bit more so that I could follow along.
It was slowpaced and not much really happened in the novel, Unfortunately, this story left me feeling quite disappointed, Unless you are really into space and time paradoxes, I wouldn't recommend this novel,
For more reviews, visit: sitelinkwww, veereading. wordpress. com I'm attempting to keep this entirely spoiler free:
This book will be a great read for fans of Dark Matter, or the recent Netflix show The OA as the story takes you on a similar "messing with science has dark repercussions" trip as the former, and then leaves you as perplexed and yet surprisingly satisfied as the latter.
I will admit that for most of the book I spent a fair amount of time wondering what exactly was going on, and there were a few times that I wondered why I should care, but the nonlinear plot that caused this confusion was exactly the device I needed to order to sink into the trouble with time that is at the center of the story.
By the end I understood that while the real and speculative science in the story was interesting
and important to the plot, it was more about how different characters could or would react to the circumstances provided to them when the concept of time becomes more malleable.
There is an almost magical element to the story, but as it's pointed out, anything that surpasses the explanations of science can be seen as magic.
Overall, I enjoyed the ride, Thank you, NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book, .