Review: The Love of Her Lives

The Love of Her Lives by C.J. Connolly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Millie has everything, a job she loves, a great BFF, a fabulous apartment. Unfortunately, she's in love with her very married work colleague, Stephen who she met at college and she often wonders what would have happened if she had chosen to join the astrological society at college with him instead of the a capella group. In fact, she and Stephen used to discuss the possibility of endless alternate realities.

Going to her best friend Bonnie's family home for the long weekend, Millie goes in through the basement door and finds herself in an alternate reality, one in which Bonnie no longer owns the house and Millie is married to a guy she briefly dated in college. Once Millie gets her head around the fact that she has somehow entered a parallel universe through the basement door in Bonnie's house she realises it could be possible to find a universe in which she and Stephen dated and got married. In each parallel universe Millie sees her life through fresh eyes and tries to help her other self, to escape addiction, or an abusive marriage, etc. Always, she checks to see if she and Bonnie are still friends, because Bonnie, her brother Ben, and their parents (Until their tragic deaths) are the closest thing to real family Millie has ever known.

This is told partly through flashbacks to key events in Millie's life, starting with when she first met Bonnie, and partly through each of Millie's alternate lives, although the blurb makes it sound like she steps straight into a world where she and Stephen are together. I liked all of this, because I'm a sucker for things like Sliders and Stargate and Quantum Leap. However, and trying not to be spoilery, it was immediately obvious to me who Millie would end up with and therefore some of the surprise was lost, it needed to be more subtle. So, at first I was going to give this three stars because of the lack of suspense about Millie's MMC but I really liked the rest of the plot and would otherwise have given it four stars, so we end up at three and a half stars.

So, if you ever wondered what would have happened if you took that job, caught that bus, accepted that invite, you'' love this.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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