The End of Mr. Y

A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits. And a dreamworld called the Troposphere?

Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists--especially Thomas Lumas and The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between.

Seeking answers, Ariel follows in Mr. Y’s footsteps: She swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere--a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination? 


This book had such great potential at so many points and it just did not pull through in any way for me, however, I think this is ultimately an issue of preference and not so much of quality. Thomas is a great writer, I definitely won't begrudge her on that. She has an excellent grasp on HOW to write, but her story left much to be desired, at least in my opinion. 

The first issue I had early on is the book within a book scenario. I don't read more than one book at a time because I worry about crossing the two stories or preferring one over the other making me want to skip parts (although I would never actually do that). In this case it is the latter. I really liked the story outside of the book, and was not a fan of the book itself. I found that in an attempt to seem as though the book was written in the 19th centurey, the author just came off as pretentious. Perhaps that was preferred style of writing at the time, but I just feel like she was trying too hard, and I am a modern literature girl myself ;) The vocabulary was irregular most of the time so I had to have my dictionary app ready at all times.  I also didn't see the point of including exerpts from the book when a vast majority of the book was just summerized in the main story anyway. I really feel that Thomas should have picked one or the other, not had a mixture of both. This concept reminded me of a book that one of my coworkers at McNally absolutely loved called House of Leaves. It was a tough one to read because it had another story going on in the footnotes of the first story. Sometimes the footnotes would go on for pages. It was too much for me. Another one I read in University called At Swim Two Birds. There were multiple stories within stories in that one. Too much. Apparently I can't handle the story within a story format.

I did enjoy the premise of though experiments throughout the book. It was a concept I had never encountered or thought about and I liked it. I think that most readers do thought experiments on their own when they get immersed in a book. The protagonist in this story said that she made a pact with herself to never identify too closely with the main character in a story because the bad, or at least most difficult, things happen to them. This made me think about my own relationship with characters in books and personally, I feel like I generally get attached to main characters (and other characters I like, for that matter) like a best friend. I mourn them or feel bad for them, or wish I could have done something to change events, but I never feel like I have been personally damaged by what happens to them. More like a lesson learned through them.

This book is meant to be a complete (excuse my language) Mind-Fuck. It weaves a story that breaks down time, and distance, and consciousness so that they don't matter any more in this fourth dimensional universe. It was a bit too much for me. Not so much that it confused or lost me, it was just all too much for me to wrap my head around. It seemed ridiculous. It was too far out there. 


Lastly, I felt at times that I was missing a lot of inside jokes that were woven into the plot. Have you ever been at a wedding where you were close to either the bride or the groom, but not so much with their new spouse, and during the speech to the one you aren't close with they tell the punchline of some story that was maybe hilarious for them, but they don't explain further, so while a handful of guests are killing themselves laughing you are rolling your eyes and wondering why they don't just tell the whole story so that everyone could be laughing? (No? Just me then? Alright...). That is what a bunch of parts of this story were like for me. I felt like because I don't really understand binary, or hieroglyphs, or all aspects of advanced math and physics, I didn't really GET the whole story. Then at the end I felt like the book was trying to tell me that all science is all a bunch of hooey that people have made up for their own purposes and we should just stick to religion. So, I'm, like, UM NO. Thanks. 

This book was really not for me, but that's not to say that it's not for you! I get the distinct impression that this book will get a wide variety of people thinking it's not good (like me), people that think it's the greatest book they have ever read, and people that think it is absolutely terrible. So I would say if you liked books like House of Leaves, or At Swim Two Birds, or liked the movie The Cell, you might like this one better than I did. This one could be for you.

I gotta say though, even though I didn't particularly like the book, it still begs the question: would you make a potion that takes you to an alternate dimension published in a book that is considered to be cursed?