All This & More by Peng Sheperd

One woman. Endless options. Every choice has consequences.

Meek, play-it-safe Marsh has just turned forty-five, and her life is in shambles. Her career is stagnant, her marriage has imploded, and her teenage daughter grows more distant by the day. Marsh is convinced she’s missed her chance at everything—romance, professional fulfillment, and adventure—and is desperate for a do-over.
 

She can’t believe her luck when she’s selected to be the star of the global sensation All This and More, a show that uses quantum technology to allow contestants the chance to revise their pasts and change their present lives. It’s Marsh’s only shot to seize her dreams, and she’s determined to get it right this time.
 

But even as she rises to become a famous lawyer, gets back together with her high school sweetheart, and travels the world, she begins to worry that All This and More’s promises might be too good to be true. Because while the technology is amazing, something seems a bit off.…
 

Can Marsh really make her life everything she wants it to be? And is it worth it?

There’s honestly a lot of great ideas going on in Peng Shepherd’s All This & More including science fiction time and reality bending, second chance life choices and romance, an underlying mystery revolving around the unreleased tv show season, and the unsettling appearance of Chrysalis. This is all done on top of a “Choose your own adventure” branching storyline book setup. Yet despite how ambitious and creative Peng’s concepts are on paper, it was amazing how uninteresting and tedious this was for me to read. I don’t know what it was exactly, but this book felt heavily catered towards suburban mother book club members in their late 30’s to 40’s based on Marsh’s characterization and the tone. I thought the Choose your own adventure concept and branching choices were decently executed but the pacing, unusual choices in focal points, and Marsh’s character were all not to my taste and squandered the excellent premise.

Also to properly review and critique the book in its full entirety, I went back and read through every potential choice including any parallel sections and each short ending. An unrelated nice touch though was the “System Error, you shouldn’t be here” due to cheating and not following the correct choice page prompts. I also read this book on an ebook copy which made it very easy to jump and review past missed choices.

Starting with All This & More’s strongest element, the Choose Your Own adventure concept was done decently well, though there were areas that it could’ve been improved on. I liked that the book had a “recommended” route to help guide along less adventurous readers or those who over-analyze and struggle to make their choices. The overall story felt like it was written in order to fit into the Choose Your Own Adventure gimmick, and it largely worked at the cost of the overall reading experience which I’ll get into shortly. Despite liking the gimmick, the first half of the novel felt like it wasted its biggest selling point by not differentiating each route or choice enough. Despite sending Marsh to drastically different points of her life and focusing on different aspects such as her marriage, career, or life balance, each choice largely felt like the same content with only slight presentation differences and sharing mostly the same end result. I read another highly amusing review that raged that the most adventurous and extreme choice you could choose for Marsh was a prospective threesome, and I whole-heartedly agree that it was an hilariously poor idea both in narrative terms and in reader interest. Regardless of which choice you make, all three options give you an option to circle back to the others which I was split on. In addition, Marsh almost fights the changes at every opportunity. On one-hand it made it easy to see what the other routes are from a completionist and critical reading standpoint, but it also made the Choose Your Own Adventure gimmick to feel inconsequential with the stakes drastically lowered.

Related to the first half of the book feeling stagnant and the same, a lot of this has to do with the main character Marsh. While I generally don’t have problems with older female main characters themselves, I found Marsh to be particularly tiring to read due to her passively avoidant personality coupled with Peng’s tendency for overreactions at seemingly minor developments. Despite being picked to be the star of a tv-show that can change any past choice and life trajectory, Marsh spends the entire first half of the book freaking out about every little choice she makes despite nearly none of them being what most consider “adventurous”. The internal character voice and thought process, despite being well-written in character, was so socially unintelligent and unaware of what was going on around her that I was longing for something sci-fi themed to come out and whack her on the head. Her complete disinterest or ignorance in the unusual things happening around her or just having illogically ordered priorities were just too much for me to care what happened to her (honestly, at one point I started to consider Marsh to be the true villain of the story ruining everything and everyone around her). I’m not sure whether to point the criticism at Peng’s execution of Marsh’s decision-making or the poorly designed conflicts that contributed to Marsh and Dylan’s divorce, but one of, if not both of them, needed to be beefed up to make Marsh’s journey less baffling and slow to read.

Outside of Marsh, the character work also felt lackluster overall. Despite the obvious intent to be a foil to Marsh and written so that you side with her, her conflicts with Dylan felt entirely contrived and quite trivial. Worse, the more I kept reading, the more I sympathized with Dylan and felt like Marsh was at fault regardless of how much the book wants you to blame Dylan. Marsh’s blindness to what obviously went wrong in their relationship and inability to address it had me questioning how dumb the reader was expected to be in order to buy the scenario being served. Marsh’s other love interest Ren suffers from entirely different issues of being bland and “perfect” with no substance to his personality. This is partly by design for the story and to contrast Dylan and for spoiler-related reasons, but he still felt like poorly developed despite having a considerable amount of pages to work with. This makes it overly easy for the reader to gravitate towards Dylan despite the book clearly wanting you to go with the 2nd chance at love choice in Ren. Scientific twin experts Ezra and Lev are more distinctive but have such brief appearances that they have much impact on the overall reading experience.

As the book transitions to its second half, Marsh makes the much-needed decision to finally be more adventurous. Unfortunately the plotting in this part comes off as being entirely unhinged and random. Rather than sticking to Marsh’s career in law like the first half, the second half throws Marsh into various different careers and locations including an environmental photographer, a telenovela actress, lawyers in various countries, etc. I was initially excited for the change as it reminded me of The Midnight Library. Unfortunately unlike the Midnight Library, these crazy life shifts felt like random tangents instead of contributing to the core storyline and mystery. This all occurs while Marsh seemingly decides to throw caution to the wind and to do 180 reverse uno on her mantra of balancing what’s best for others with her own happiness. Yet again the book tries to use these poor choices as a set up for a moral character development moment, but it’s so obvious, and quite out of character, that it instead made me care about Marsh even less. It’s a sign that something went wrong with the storytelling when you find Jo, Marsh’s best friend, to be more compelling when she’s not even a critical character to the plot.

Despite the much needed infusion of the science fiction elements and plot reveals that are part of the book’s genre and marketing, the last 25% of the book felt quite messy despite its creative ideas. Perhaps my standards are a bit high since I read a decent amount of hard science fiction novels, but I found the explanations and science behind how the Bubble works to be woefully crude and unbelievable. Despite having the season star and the shows’ production staff included within the bubble, I never could understand just how changes made in the bubble were reflected outside of it (or perhaps that’s a narrative choice that wasn’t developed enough). Is the bubble even a tangible thing or is it a metaphorical science concept, I’m not sure because so little is written about it. The concept of one person’s actions and life changing without affecting others outside of “the bubble” also doesn’t make any sense and conflicts with just about every branching/parallel world theory out there. To make matters worse, the book tries to throw out plot twists and reveals that should’ve been surprising in theory, yet landed flat due to not being set up properly (ie. revealing characters in unexpected places that have barely any screen time prior to their dramatic reappearance). While I liked the culprit behind Chrysalis and the season 2 cancellation, the actual Chrysalis itself and its imagery felt more like a “huh?” moment then an “ah-hah!” reaction. The unveiling of the mystery frankly brings up more questions than answers that the plot doesn’t even try to address, focusing only on closing out Marsh’s personal storyline and nothing else. The vision is definitely there and I can see what the book was trying to do with its flavor of science fiction, but I would keep expectations on the actual end result low.

It’s within this section that one of the book’s best split choices comes up. Though both routes ultimately branch back together at the season finale, this section was easily my favorite and the best executed “episode” of the book. In a similar fashion to The Matrix where the world and universe is broken, the two branches allies Marsh with either Lev or Ezra, the twin scientific technical advisors on the show’s staff. Marsh pairing off with Ezra revisits Marsh’s high school years while Lev’s route runs Marsh through glitched out versions of her season’s later episodes. It’s a shame that in an initial readthrough, only one of these parts can be experienced. I ended up choosing Lev’s choice initially but jumped back to read the other, ultimately deciding that Ezra’s choice felt like it contributed more to Marsh’s character than the other which had a more action thriller feel. Unfortunately regardless of which choice you take, both choices reconnect at the tv show season finale where you’re offered three endings. Again, I felt like the endings were great in concept but lacking in substance. Each ending had only a single short chapter of content and while one was a decent, if open-ended, conclusion to the story, the other two left a lot to be desired.

At the end of the day, I appreciate All This & More’s ideas and concepts far more than what I actually read. While the Choose Your Own Adventure element was refreshing at times, I felt most of Peng’s effort went to working out the different choices splits while the actual storytelling fell by the wayside. To be honest, I could probably even overlook the questionable science fiction elements if the character work were stronger, but unfortunately just about everything felt sub-par one way or another which is a shame. 1.5 rounded up to 2 based on ambition alone, the consolation is that I am tempted to read one of Peng’s more standard novels (specifically The Cartographers) to see if her storytelling is stronger without the distracting choices gimmick. But as for All This & More, I don’t think I can recommend this one unless you are looking for the said suburban mom book club read.