All Our Wrong Todays
by Lucy S
Screenwriter Elan Mastai’s debut novel is a delightful, insightful and wild ride that takes us on a winding path through time, space, and alternate realities, impelled by strong, witty dialogue and a looming sense of “what-if.”
All Our Wrong Todays is difficult to describe. It challenges your mind with a plot that twists through the space-time continuum with rapidity, but I highly recommend that you pick-up this witty, worthwhile book and take this incredible, zigzag of a journey with Mastai’s affable narrator, Tom Barren, as he loops back and forth through time, space and consciousness. Mastai has created in Tom a wonderfully readable narrative voice who keeps his story funny and artful even when describing frightening situations that reveal the darker forces that might be at play inside all of us. When we are introduced to Tom, he is living in a futuristic-like 2016 that could have been imagined in the 1950s and featured in The Jetsons; hover cars, clothes that are a second skin and regenerate every day, perfectly designed, person-specific meals. Everyone in this “future” has everything they could want or need. In a world where “oil was irrelevant, basic resources were plentiful, and everyone had access to all manner of technological enhancements...scientific discovery was the dominant social motivator.” And the scientific discoveries in this book are decidedly big and life-altering, sometimes literally. Tom’s father is hard at work developing the first time-travel machine, and Tom is employed as one of his back-up “chrononauts.” Tom’s failure in his father’s lab sets off a mad-capped series of events that have us boomeranging through various time periods, past and future, and altered versions of Tom himself, and of his friends and family.
All Our Wrong Todays is positively mind-bending in its whorls through these dimensions, as Tom introduces who he might have been, or still could be, in a parallel universe. Tom asks “What happens if the hard skin of reality punctures? What comes out?” His alter egos, John and Victor, show what might happen by demonstrating the success and failure, and the good and bad, that live inside each of us. Ultimately All Our Wrong Todays is about how we choose to live in the present we are given, and the way we reconcile all the dreams and voices we carry with us.
For fans of The Martian and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
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