Parallel

Parallel by Lauren Miller was a original read following Abby Barnes as she discovers the power of choice and the cosmic effects it can have on everything we know and do.

Your path will change. Your destiny doesn't.

Abby Barnes had a plan. The Plan. She'd go to a great university, study journalism, and land a job at a national newspaper, all before she turned twenty-two. But one tiny choice - deciding to take a drama class in her senior year of high school - changed all that. Now, on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Abby is stuck on a Hollywood movie set, wishing she could rewind her life. The next morning, she's in a room at Yale, with no memory of how she got there. 

Overnight, it's as if her life has been rewritten.

With the help of  Caitlin, her science phenom BFF, Abby discovers that this new reality - an Ivy League address, a place on the crew team, a birthday blind date with a cute lacrosse player - is the result of  a cosmic collision of parallel universes that has Abby living an alternate version of her life. And not only that: Abby's life changes every time her parallel self makes a new choice. As she struggles to navigate her ever-shifting existence, forced to live out the consequences of a path she didn't choose, Abby must let go of the Plan and learn to focus on the present, without losing sight of who she is, the boy who might just be her soul mate, and the destiny that's finally within reach.

Parallel was just the book for me, as someone who likes to plan their whole life, who likes to know when and where something is happening, I could relate 100% to Abby. I sometimes think maybe people like me do need a cosmic shift in their life so we can realise what is important - what is right in front of us or what we want to be there. It addresses the important issue of the power of choice and explored that question teenagers kill themselves over - what if I'd done that differently, where would I be now? Would it be better? 

And Miller really puts across the point that we can make the best out of whatever path we take: wherever we chose it; stumbled across it; or got flung from the high flying speeding motorway onto it.

I enjoyed the way Miller made Parallel about Abby Barnes - there weren't any bad guys out to get her, nothing we were running from, it was just Abby, her choices and her life. Also the bonus of having two lives is we get two brilliant stories in one book! I would quite happily have followed either Abby on their lives as they both made for good YA fluffy reads.

There wasn't any one part of Parallel that was WOW! but it was overall a good read and I enjoyed the focus on Abby, her lives, her boyfriends (ooh there was some brilliant romance - very gripping, believable and utterly cheerworthy!)..... I will go back and read Parallel again, undoubtedly pick something up I'd missed and will enjoy it as much as before. It gets a decent 4 out of 5 and can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk for £5.75 (paperback) or £5.46 (kindle). It's published by Scholastic and is Miller's debut novel, and a remarkably well put together one for a first novel!

En Bon Lu!