PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewInstead of using a story-within-a-story framework (think Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love), or an entangled symmetry (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), Zapata layers his worlds flat atop one another. The reader has to hunt for traces of communication between story lines ... To cover so much ground, Zapata often summarizes plot for pages ... When Zapata, too, favors people over events, their stories come alive ... Though Maxwell’s physics is deliberately vague, the implications are immediate and real. Through the allegory of the multiverse, Zapata reinterprets the extent and toll of exile on Earth, the gulf between universes of human experience.
