The Other Life

By: Ellen Meister

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

If you could return to the road not taken, would you? Happily married and pregnant, Quinn Braverman has an ominous secret. Every time she makes a major life decision, she knows an alternate reality exists in which she made the opposite choice---not only that, she knows how to cross over. But even in her darkest moments---like her mother's suicide---Quinn hasn't been tempted to slip through...until she receives devastating news about the baby she's carrying. The grief lures her to peek across the portal, and before she knows it she's in the midst of the other life: the life in which she married another man and is childless. The life in which her mother is still very much alive. Quinn is forced to make a heartbreaking choice. Will she stay with the family she loves and her severely disabled child? Or will an easier life---and the primal need to be with her mother---win out?

©2011 Ellen Meister (P)2011 Tantor

Critic reviews

"This is the thinking woman's beach read, a love story to the modern family, written with a deep and lovely understanding of mothers and daughters and the sacrifices they'll make for each other." (Joshilyn Jackson, author of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming)

Thought provoking

Any additional comments?

A fascinating concept. This book left me wondering about the many choices I have made, and what I might have done in my other life....

More of a beach read

I do like chick lit, but it needs to have an edge. This book doesn't quite get there, and I don't know why. The story elements are all there: a paradoxical "what if" situation, a woman's choice between two equally fantastic and glamourous lives, all the material wealth that this woman could want.

I think the narrator is very "preppy", to use an outdated word. She sounds as though she is narrating a J. Crew catalogue, and all the male voices have the same personality, like she is speaking with a smirk or a snark. But I do think she's the perfect chick lit reader.

But the story is not resolved. The listener wants this woman to make a decision, and the book ends just right after this, so that you don't see the consequences of her decision. I guess deciding one way or another would connect the author with one or another "politically correct" position and detract from the storybook feeling.

This is a good read if you want to escape for a few hours, and brings up the question I'm sure many readers have asked themselves about the road not taken.