Rating: ✫✫✫✫
"All we want in this world is happiness but it takes so much courage not to settle. It's human nature not to take risks in most cases."
Some moments change everything. One decision can change fate, and put you on the path to a completely different life.
Nineteen year old Eva is cycling in Cambridge, and swerves to avoid a dog. In doing so, she meets Jim, who asks her out for a drink. What follows is divided into three potential courses of action:
Version 1: Eva says yes, and a whirlwind romance begins.
Version 2: Eva says no, and returns to her boyfriend, and their multitude of problems.
Version 3: Eva says yes, but her past catches up with her and complicates things.
The Versions of Us follows all three possibilities, and demonstrates how the course of true love never did run smooth. The interactions of Eva and Jim in every version are a reminder that every decision has the power to change the path of life dramatically, and that you should always follow your heart.
✼
I loved this book and the whole idea behind it. The concept is that every decision has the potential to change your life; can put you on a path from which everything else spirals. I just felt, when reading this book, that it spoke to me. Following your heart is hard but important, and getting by isn't the same as being happy. It actually made me emotional in places, because Eva and Jim go through so many battles in their lives, and every tiny decision causes a long sequence of consequences that are in equal parts heart-warming and devastating.
Eva and Jim are wonderful, and the three versions of their story are closely linked, but varied. In some places, they are together and happy, in others they are living very separate lives. And at some points, timing is their biggest enemy. I think this book started off fantastically, but towards the end it became a bit monotonous and tiresome. The characters became irrational just to stop the story from becoming boring, and I think that ruined the integrity of the overall concept somewhat. However, it was so beautifully written, and for the most part the different stories of Eva and Jim were done justice.
*spoiler alert*
