Review: Love and Other Paradoxes

Love and Other Paradoxes by Catriona Silvey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

“You’re from the future.”

Love and Other Paradoxes was a story about how your future could change if you knew your future. Joe is a twenty year old student at Cambridge who aspires to be a poet like the greats he's studying, but as he's studying, he's also getting a heavy case of impostor syndrome. A middle class Scot in the rich environment of Cambridge and raised in a household that was encouraging but also worked to keep his feet on the ground, Joe feels lost as he tries to measure up and graduate. When he bumps into the barista he was having some chemistry with and he picks up the book that fell out of her purse, he sees his name on the cover and picture of himself as a sixty year old man. As a panicked Esi tries to grab it out of his hands, Joe runs and finds himself in his dorm room with a piece of his future.

“I want to be remembered.”

Told all from Joe's point-of-view, the first half of this had me locked in as Joe learns that Esi is from the year 2044. She's accessed Joe's current time, 2005, by paying a time tourist company that allows people to take trips to observe famous people, which he'll be in her time for writing poetry. The time travel gets as deep as “I traveled through a wormhole” for most of the book and instead focuses on how knowing your future could change a person. Joe knows that he writes an impactful and famous book of poetry for a girl he's only glimpsed on campus and they fall in love later in life. So when he has the chance to meet this girl, he enters a poetry contest with one of the poems from his future book and ends up paired with her as she'll do a dramatic reading of the poem, he's all in, ready to start to his future now. This leads to Joe living life different, taking more chances and slacking off from school, as he thinks nothing he does matters as his future is already determined.

Determinism was nice in theory, but it didn’t actually save you any effort.

After the rush of knowing his future wears off, Joe starts to wonder if he's actually changing his future with his current actions as he learns that Esi's whole point of taking the time trip wasn't to observe him but to try and change her mother's future, as she ends up dying in a car accident when Esi is eight. This leads to some themed questioning of determinism and we get a second half that meanders and jumps weeks at a time as Joe begins to realize that not only what he does now still matter, the future he thought he wanted may not be what he truly wants. The beginning also had Joe and Esi developing a friendship that had some sparks but the middle abandons them a bit as Joe tries to start his romance with his future wife early. I missed their companionship and when Esi comes back into the picture in the later second half, they had lost some momentum for me.

He wanted to be with her, even if it was temporary, even if it was doomed. He wanted to taste every moment they could possibly have before it was over.

If you've been or are familiar with Cambridge, you'd probably enjoy the setting descriptions and Joe's roommate and other secondary characters added to the flushed out feeling of the world. It just felt like the beginning was more tightly held together and then the second half got lost in where it wanted to go and how to work everything out regarding the time travel aspects. You won't get solid spelled out answers to how everything wraps up for the characters but more of “infinite universes” and a kind of weak easy solution for how Joe and Esi's romance endures. This started strong with an interesting concept, the underlining discussion on determinism was thought provoking, Joe and Esi had beginning spark, but then the second half lost its way and Esi disappeared for too long, only to anemically drift back in. If feeling nostalgic for 2005 Cambridge, with some romance, wormholes, infinite universes, and inventive weapons for the campus game Assassins, this had those eclectic elements.

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