Intriguing premise, well written, ending totally does not work for me. ( )

Competent, but not anything I'm adding to my list of permanent favorites. ( )

I really liked this in the end, although it took almost to the end for that liking to really kick in. Kress is a wonderful writer with a strong sense of craft--she even writes books on writing. She became a favorite after I read her Beggars in Spain. This isn't as great as that--but still good. It's set in near future America of 2022--even closer now than when it was published in 1990. As is usually the case with science fiction, such speculative details date fast. For quite a while I found that annoying and distracting. The backdrop includes an AIDS epidemic that took a much larger, much more devastating toll than has been the case--nearly wiping out the African population and causing a major anti-gay backlash. There's also this weird cult of Gaiests who believe the planet automatically corrects any ecological damage. It annoyed me because it made me think, wow, no wonder I'm so skeptical about doomsday predictions such as global warming. I've been reading science fiction novels since childhood, almost all of which have end-the-world or near post-apocalyptic scenarios that were supposed to overtake us by the new millennium. Then there's the aircars and soybean burgers. Smell the cliches!

But eventually I just switched over to thinking of this as alternate history rather than future history--and it really does have an original premise: people can surgically recover the memory of their past lives. The novel follows three such people: Caroline, a woman with a dying child; Robbie, a thief, and Joe, a lawyer still troubled by his failed marriage. I liked the way they connect up with each other--and how, eventually, the recovery of their past lives connect up with Kress' imagined future. ( )

It started out with a quite interesting concept: Three people go in for "Past Life Access Surgery" and find that they were all connected in their past lives. Unfortunately, the entire first half was taken up in the introductions of the characters, none of whom are terribly likable, and then once things started to get interesting, a truly unfathomable concept is introduced involving the "key to the overmemory" and what that means for all mankind and how that might relate to God. I still don't think I understand this book. Generally, I enjoy Nancy Kress, particularly her Beggars trilogy, but I think with this she was reaching too hard for a concept that never quite got fleshed out. ( )