I'm a sucker for mind-bending sci-fi thrillers and Blake Crouch has recently shot to the top of my list of authors to look out for in this genre.

Recursion was impossible to put down. I'm slogging through my workday with a whopping 40 minutes of sleep because I needed to finish this book last night.

Many thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Crown Publishing for the review copy of Recursion.

This was absolutely a page-turner for me. I usually shy away from sci-fi/fantasy books, but the characters and the mystery in this one kept me coming back for more.

I loved the two main characters, Barry- the cop and Helena- the neuroscientist made an unlikely dynamic duo as they tried to counteract or stop the False Memory Syndrome. I was rooting for them both, even though I wasn't quite sure that Helena could step away from her incredible invention, or that the alternate lives that Barry and his daughter could live would be worth it for them.

The characters were well developed; the storyline was actually believable; and as always, Blake Crouch did an excellent job with the prose.

Blake Crouch delivers again with a mind-bending sci-fi thriller! Recursion was such an interesting read that made you really think about how every action has a ripple effect, and could the advancement of technology ultimately lead to the down fall of humanity. High action with a love story woven in, you won't be able to put this book down!

Thanks to Netgalley and Crown Publishing for this ARC!

In this timeline and any others that exist, I am blown away by the genius of Blake Crouch. I absolutely loved Recursion. This novel is like an action packed, sci-fi adventure onion with all it's wonderful layers. Just when I feel comfortable with the direction of the story and think I know where it's headed, Blake peels back another layer and gets me hooked for more. I loved reading Dark Matter and I loved reading Recursion even more. Blake Crouch just gets better with each novel he writes and we all w get rewarded because of it. I highly recommend Recursion and I look forward to reading more from Blake Crouch.

Recursion By Blake Crouch
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

Of the 3 books by Blake Crouch I have read this is by FAR my favorite!!! I loved the time travel to different timelines and the mind bending effects of watching how changing something in a timeline effects everything.

Had me thinking about all the decision we make both great and small and the ripple effect it has on SO MANY things!!!

This book will give your brain a work out in the best kind of way. As you travel with Barry and Helena and try and figure out how to back up to try and save the world from itself.

So grateful to Netgalley for the Advanced Readers Copy.

I loved "Dark Matter" and was really excited to get an early copy of this book. As with 'Dark Matter' there is alot of complicated science in this one that went over my head, but the story itself is compelling and twisted. It's difficult to write a proper review of this without giving too much away, so I will just say that in addition to themes of regret and loss, woven together with scientific advances and the ethical quandaries of attempting to rewrite history, there is a love story at the center of all of this. I enjoyed it, as I've enjoyed everything Blake Crouch has written, but the time lines do become very hard to follow and toward the end there came a point when I just wanted them to stop what they were doing because it was getting ridiculous. Thank you to Netgalley and Crown Publishing Group for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Lou Jacobs's Reviews > Recursion

Recursion by Blake Crouch
Recursion
by Blake Crouch (Goodreads Author)
M 50x66
Lou Jacobs's review Mar 27, 2019 · edit
it was amazing

What a mind blowing read! This is the first Blake Crouch book for me ... this has to be one of the best reads in the last several years ... if I could it would be a 5 + Star. What starts out as a life long pursuit by neuroscientist Helena Smith to record and capture the neuronal substrate of human memory turns out to be much more. She painstakingly develops over years the technology to accomplish this by building "the chair" and it's attendant software and infrastructure. This leads to an unanticipated ability to travel back in time to an earlier vividly recalled memory. However, the unintended consequences being a reality shift for not only the time traveller, but all mankind ... effectively creating an alternate timeline. This would lead to the possibility of altering events ... not only redoing your live, but also all mankind. This technology falling into the wrong hands would lead to dire and possibly nefarious purposes.
Suddenly the Centers for Disease Control identifies multiple cases of patients presenting with acute false memories .... a fully imagined alternate history covering huge swaths of their life. The patients apparently have two sets of memories in their consciousness. This entity is termed FMS. ...
false memory syndrome. Some of the patients cannot stand this new reality and this accounts for a huge uptick of suicides. Naturally scientists are unable to account for this new phenomena ... we however, suspect someone is using the chair and altering reality.
NYC detective Barry Sutton is caught up in the invesigation of FMS and it's resultant suicides.
He crosses paths with the forces actively using the chair and is swiftly catapulted into the consequences of using the chair. He goes back in his memories to intervene and prevent the death of his 16 year old daughter by a hit and run driver .... and enters into a new timeline, effecting all. Helena realizes that the chair has to be destroyed to preserve mankind from madness and destruction.
The paths of Helena and Barry are intertwined in their search for a method to stop this subversion of her technology. Helena's goal was to help people... find a way to save memory for the deteriorating brain ... perhaps benefiting millions affected with Alzheimer's Disease.
Crouch proves to be a great storyteller ... the reader is swept along in this complex and relentless narrative and convincingly buys into this magnificent concept premise. Time being an allusion... and our perception of it is flawed .... the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one small slice at a time.... better to view our life as a book, and we can only perceive one moment, one page at a time.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House publishing for providing an Uncorrected ARC of this wonderful immersive page-turner and genre-bending novel in exchange for an honest review.
I can't wait to go back and read Crouch's previous book: Dark Matter.

This book surprised me in many ways, not the least of which was how romantic it is (but not sappy). The narrative is complex but well-thought-out, the writing is smooth and enjoyable, and as long as you don't dwell too much on the science fiction aspects of the story – holes can be pretty easy to find – it's a good read. I really enjoyed it. I'd give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.

THIS BOOK. This is my second favourite book read in 2019 so far (my first favourite is a topic to come in 2020, so we'll deal with that then.) But this book! THIS BOOK! Ohmygosh. I read the description and was highly intrigued but I didn't expect it to warp my brain quite so much. My brain is a different being having read this book.

I have never been more glad of train delays. Normally my morning commute is seamless, but thankfully, today I ended up stuck in a tunnel which is good because otherwise I would have been sitting at work finishing this because it was so very readable and so mind boggling and so curious. I have an issue with tending to completely race through books, but with this one, I had to pause and think, because Crouch brought in so many topics for contemplation. But I also had to finish it as it was gorgeously pacy.

There is a subtle love story (my favourite kind), and there is a lot of maturity in the discussion of what makes a couple work and what makes them drift apart, and whether that's a bad thing (spoiler alert: it's not.) I appreciated the relationships in this book so much. The nuances of the parent child relationships especially were incredibly touching and powerful. I just want to take the big relationship here and squeeze them a bit and cry with them and love with them. "You look like someone who might want to buy me a drink." "My soul knows your soul. In any time." My heart. I forgot I had one.

And Helena! Helena! Helena, my love, how you evolved! Once you've lived a certain amount of years, you're significantly different to who you once were, and this book does such a great job of capturing that sentiment and exploring it--how you're the same, but different.

THIS ENTIRE CONCEPT. And the title. Oh, how I love the title (hello I was a computer science minor and data structures was one of my favourite college classes and recursion is endlessly fascinating.) The title actually helped me to comprehend what was happening, and though I will never fully understand, the author did such a good job of explaining it in a way that was just detailed enough to be believable. To the extent that I was indeed questioning the space-time continuum as I sat on that train this morning, as I sat at a show last night, as I pretended to pay attention to the nice pair conversing with me. Was that conversation really happening? Would I remember it enough to have 120 synapses fire? What aspects was I paying attention to? So many thoughts that this provoked.

And the ending worked. Endings never work in books like this, but this wasn't too shabby. It made sense, and while I want to know more nuances of what happened as an epilogue to the epilogue (how annoyed I was to read the word "epilogue"!) logically it made sense following the timeline that had already happened. And when I figured out, slightly earlier, how it was going to happen, man. Oh man. That just changed everything, too.

I hadn't realised until before writing this review that Crouch also wrote DARK MATTER which I wasn't actually a super big fan of, but I did adore the concept, so now I'm so terribly excited to see what world he dreams up next. And maybe dive into backlist. Once I get through this pile of library books. (Ha!)

So excited to tell everyone I know about this book (though I'm going to have to refine my pitch a bit here before I become known as the crazy memory girl.)

One of the greatest things Crouch brings to literature is the utter shock and surprise that comes with his stories. They are so truly unique and original that I consistently find myself questioning how someone’s brain even functions the way his does. Asking myself how someone can even begin to think this up. I think that if I tried to spoil this entire story right now, I may not even be able to because it’s such a complicated and intricate web that Crouch has woven here. What leaves me even more impressed though, is that despite how complicated the story is, I was able to follow along *for the most part* because Crouch is able to make ideas that would normally fly right on over my head, accessible and tangible.

Recursion is truly a whirlwind and it has everything any reader could ask for. It’s exciting, thrilling, heart warming and gritty all at the same time. It asks questions I haven’t ever thought of and created scenarios that made my brain ache to contemplate. It challenged me as a reader and it challenged my ideas of what creates “reality” and “the present”. I should’ve read this with someone else because I wish I could have talked to someone who was reading it at the same time as me. However, I’m super excited to add this to my list of book recommendations for the future and to discuss it then!

In the end this is another total slam dunk for me and I can’t wait to see what Crouch comes up with next. This is a twisty novel that you’re never going to be able to pin down where it’s about to head next. It left me truly breathless at points because it felt like I was reading and the story was moving at break-neck speed. There were points I almost needed to take a break because so much is being thrown at you at once. If this review has confused you at all, I totally understand because this book is insane to try to explain. However, I still can’t suggest picking it up enough!

Wow! This is some effed up sh!t, in the best of ways. An intense sci-fi thriller that was hard to put down.

It pushed me to the brink of sanity in understanding what reality really is, cause now isn't now, it's actually a few seconds ago, always, because of how long it take the brain to process what it's seeing and hearing. Now couple that with the power of memories (good and bad), and the intricacies of time travel. Throw in family, relationships, and how politics and technology can affect the world, now mix it up real good, and.........Mind blown, mike drop.

Confused yet. Start reading and don't stop till you're done. You won't be disappointed.

I got through this book but the title is very apt! The same thing recurring over and over made me want to get to the end. The only reason I kept going was I wanted to see if the author redeemed himself in the end. Sadly. he didn't.

“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?”*

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

After witnessing, her mother’s mental deterioration as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, Helen’s dream is to preserve memories. With her funding running out, she’s desperate to find a way to continue her research. An offer of a bottomless budget comes just in time, but her benefactor has a different vision for her invention. Meanwhile, Barry can’t stop thinking of woman who killed herself in front of him and her claims of suffering from False Memory Syndrome. His unofficial investigation leads him to a startling, life-changing discovery.

RECURSION includes many of the things I loved about DARK MATTER, i.e. the hard science that brings the sci-fi world to life, the mystery element as Barry explores the cause of False Memory Syndrome, philosophy, and romance. RECURSION is an ambitious book, and only an author of Crouch’s caliber could have pulled it off. He puts Helena and Barry into the grinder, giving them a problem with a seemingly impossible solution and great costs that come with every attempt to solve the puzzle.

After reading Merriam-Webster’s definition of ‘recursion:’ “the determination of a succession of elements (such as numbers or functions) by operation on one or more preceding elements according to a rule or formula involving a finite number of steps,” I can’t imagine a more fitting title for this book.

There’s a cool Easter egg in the Acknowledgments section. The author lists people he paid tribute to in the naming of many of the characters. When I was reading the book, I caught one of them, which made the reveal even more fun.

Thanks to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for the opportunity to experience this novel in advance of its release.

*Please note that my review is based on uncorrected text.

This book is flat-out awesome. I am not generally a reader of sci-fi stuff, but Blake Crouch’s novels are impossible to resist. Highly recommend this new one!

Blake Crouch writes such mind-bending 'fasten your seatbelts and get ready for this ride!' science fiction that is always such a fun and quick read. Recursion is a story that is enjoyed best if you go into the story without knowing too much.

We start in two different timelines. In one timeline, we meet Barry Sutton, a police officer who tries to intervene when a woman threatens to jump off a building due to False Memory Syndrome (FMS). She has recovered a set of 'dead' memories of another life in which she was happily married and had a son. When she visits the man from her memories, he is married to another woman and there is no son. Worried that he has caught FMS, he begins to investigate. In another timeline, we meet a brilliant memory researcher, Helena Smith who has just received the opportunity of a lifetime to pursue her life's work and try to record memories in an effort to re-instate them, so that we can relive those memories. Not surprisingly, these two lines eventually intersect and the mind-bending begins.

This is not a perfect story (the timeline loops become a bit repetitive, and it accepts flashbulb memory as a given, when this is a controversial area and there is lots of evidence against it), but it's an enjoyable one.

Thanks to the author, NetGalley, and Crown Publishing for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

Blake Crouch’s latest novel, Recursion, is a deftly-plotted, interesting, and emotional read that I couldn’t put down.

The novel opens as police officer Barry Sutton attempts to persuade a woman with False Memory Syndrome-a condition where someone wakes up with a new set of memories of a life they never lived- to not commit suicide. That’s about as much of the plot as I would want to know going in to this book. A lot of the fun of this novel lies in how the story twists and turns.

Mr. Crouch knows how to lay a plot down. He also has the knack for creating characters a reader can care about. There’s real emotion on display that grounds the high concept Michael Crichton-esque story ideas and gives the novel a fuller feel.

All in all, this was a fun book with some really interesting ideas and a good emotional core. Loved it!

Crouch is the master of sci-fi in my book. He does it again with a twisty, turny thriller of epic proportions. The concepts that this man can think of are insane! I can’t say much without spoiling, but you should definitely pick this up when it releases in June. Five stars, as always.

Filled with robust characters and a trippy, mind-bending plot, Blake Crouch’s Recursion is guaranteed to quicken your pulse. NYC police officer Barry Sutton is investigating an anomaly referred to as False Memory Syndrome when he begins to display symptoms of this strange, new phenomenon. Meanwhile, neuroscientist Helena Smith is devoted to curing memory loss disorders in an effort to prevent a parent from further declining and forgetting her altogether. What happens when these two charged people crash into each other is explosive and you’ll spend the rest of your time trying to solve this multilayered puzzle as you’re presented with ethical dilemmas that will leave you questioning your own belief system. I was doubtful that I could love another Blake Crouch novel as much as I love Dark Matter but Recursion superseded my expectations. Highly recommend.

I loved this. I don't have much else to say so I'm going to repeat myself. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this. I loved this.

I'd previously read Wayward Pines and absolutely loved it so when I saw Recursion (same author and as a computer programmer I was curious how he'd include recursion in the book) I had to read it. OH MY GOSH. I received it this morning and I couldn't put it down at all. The book immediately sucks you in, holds you in it's grasp, and shakes you up.... and I loved it. I kept choosing to read today and even though I needed to go to bed earlier tonight I ended up staying up reading it (and had to review it while I could still feel the book). The book made sense with it's ending although I mostly wish I could've kept reading as it ended so soon (since I couldn't put it down). A pragmatist in me was happy with it's length as if it was longer I wouldn't've been able to go bed until I finished it.
So glad I read this. It's one of those books that feel far out there but at the same time you could still see it occurring right now.