Book Review: 'The Versions of Us' by Laura Barnett

My Mum was given this book as a gift last summer. It was a best seller and listed by Waterstones as one of their top picks, and a quick read of the blurb persuaded me that it was right up my street ...

Brief Summary: Eva and Jim are both students in Cambridge. One day, they bump into each other in the street. What happens after that could completely change their life paths and the books goes onto to follow the pair in three different versions of their lives.

The concept was quite intriguing ... can a single moment or event that we occur on a day to day basis totally change our futures? Possibly. The setting, the fact that it was about 19 year old students, and the fact that Eva is an aspiring author all drew me in. However, because the book follows the pair through their lives, those elements on feature a little.

I must admit I didn't love this book overall, for a few reasons. One tell-tale sign of this was that it took me AGES to read, and I kept leaving it for a while and coming back to it, whereas if I had been engrossed I would have devoured it haha.

This probably also didn't help with my second point - confusion! Each chapter was simply entitled Version 1, 2, or 3, but it didn't alternate between them evenly, rather flipped between the three in a rather random order, and so I quickly found it impossible to fully keep up with which version I was reading about, and got so tired of trying that I gave up and just muddled through, hoping to catch up a few pages into each chapter! This confusion was exacerbated by the fact that all the version were fairly similar and covered similar events, but just slightly differently.

While I appreciated that Barnett was a very good writer, and enjoyed her style, I began to find the book kind of boring because nothing exciting really happened, it literally just went through their lives, picking out events.

Furthermore, and probably my biggest criticism in terms of plot, was that basically all of the major relationships introduced in this novel not only ended, but ended due to infidelity. Like, literally every couple split up because one of them cheated! While I have no problem with reading about infidelity, it was definitely overused here in my opinion, and served little purpose other than to create a very pessimistic view of marriage!

Despite all I have said, Barnett did create characters the reader cared for, empathised with, and wanted the best for. You find yourself rooting for certain scenarios, and upset when things go wrong. She successfully describes the joys and heartbreaks of a number of different types of relationships- not only romantic, but between children and their parents, between friends and colleagues, etc.

In my opinion, this book is quite flawed, but is not badly written and so, while I won't personally be in a rush to recommend it to friends (and I am honestly just glad to have reached the end!) I wouldn't be put off reading more of Laura Barnett's work in the future.

Catriona x



Reading Challenge: 3/21