Expansive ... The novel’s success hinges on your ability to suspend your disbelief as profoundly as you draw upon your capacity to love. With the portals and time travel, the story requires an open mind. Even with such a fantastical plot, Benjamin draws complex, deeply human characters ... Benjamin could have written a far shorter novel. Some may say that less is more. But Under Story isn’t meant to be a minimalist work ... Expands our expectations of living.
A beguiling, unpredictable study in sorrow and an uplifting ode to nature’s regenerative genius ... Without spoiling the book’s many surprises, it’s fair to say that by design, much of the action contradicts the empirical truths that govern our lives. Some aspects of the story don’t quite cohere. But as a depiction of grief, it is attentive, nuanced and humane, a powerful portrait of a woman navigating the fraught distance between pain and healing ... Smart and wonderfully strange.
A 500-page melodrama of parental devotion and quantum hokum. Imagine Orpheus and Eurydice meets Interstellar, but starring Tom Hanks from Big ... lenty of imagined worlds are nonsense, and gloriously so. The problem is that Benjamin keeps drawing our attention to her shonky narrative machinery. She answers questions we’d never thought to ask ... She seems unsure her cosmic premise can carry its own mysteries. But the more we learn, the more distracted we are ... Part of the problem is length. Rewound life is a gimmick, a thought experiment. The books that do it best are wry, incisive and short.
Benjamin intimately describes life in Antarctica, elucidates the wondrous communication between fungi and trees that fascinates Laurel and the mind-bending suppositions of quantum physics, all while gradually revealing the tragedy that induces Laurel and Eli to take a crazy-dangerous leap of faith. Veined with fascinating portraits of real-life scientists, this is a magnetizing love story of many dimensions, some gorgeously authentic, others forced in their painstaking speculation. Ultimately this capacious, suspenseful, and deeply moving novel of scientific and emotional quests offers provocative perspectives on obsession, parenting, time, forgiveness, and love.
Fans of Benjamin...will be thrilled as she again delivers on all levels. Equally appropriate for fans of mycelium, odes to the magic of the Earth, and speculation on the myriad possibilities for humanity.
There were scenes in this novel that I had a visceral reaction to. When the author is able to create an idea out of thin air and make it feel like something that could happen to you, you know it’s good ... I love a science fiction novel that doesn’t dumb the science down, and manages to translate complex ideas in a digestible way. Under Story strikes this balance beautifully — leaving me feeling a little smarter than I was before.
Exquisitely imagined and emotionally rich ... Benjamin draws the depth of what Laurel and Eli are going through with aching precision, in prose that often reads like poetry, making this expansive literary sci-fi tale powerfully resonant.
Blending literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and scientific research, Benjamin has created a genre-bending novel that is deeply concerned with the tenuous, mysterious, and enduring symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Ambitious, poignant, and deeply human.
Benjamin holds the reader’s attention with well-conceived depictions of the Duoverse, where people age in reverse from death to birth, but the heart of the story is in Laurel and Eli’s desperate attempt to mend their lives and recover their love. This captivates.
