The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Review

  • Author: Claire North
  • Series: Standalone
  • Genre: Sci-fi/Historical
  • No of pages: 405
  • Date read: 05.04.19 – 11.04.19
  • Rating: 4 stars
  • Challenge: ONTD April Theme “Time Travel”

I have been needing a book like this for so long!

This is my current favourite of 2019!

I read this book for the ONTD book of the month of April. The theme for April was time-travel and I was curious about what I was going to read and saw this book which had been sitting on my TBR for so long and thought, this is the moment!

Overall, Harry is a really intriguing character! We see him over 15 lifetimes and we learn more and more about him as each life passes. We know what makes him tick, what makes him laugh, what makes him cry and he feels like someone you know and understands like a friend as we watch him go on this journey. I really enjoyed his POV.

One of my favourites thing about the plot was the flipping between the current over-arching narrative working alongside the little peeks into important moments in Harry’s other lives. We will have a major plot point occur and followed up by an insight into his childhood from his 4th life and we learn about his relationship with his father. I think the pacing works well, switching between moments of high adrenaline and then moments of calm. I think this kind of narrative is also important to Harry’s character development.

I loved the Cronus Club and all the characters you meet because of the Cronus Club. Especially, all the jokes that members and other Kalacharka make regarding their immortality and constantly going through new cycles of life. I loved the jokes of not wanting to go through puberty again. The Cronus Club as a franchise was really intriguing, I loved learning how they worked and how they communicated with the future and the past.

North’s writing to me was really enjoyable. Her writing sucked me into the point where I couldn’t put the book down. I just wanted to keep on reading!

One thing I would say is there is a lot of science jargon and philosophical debate that is held between two characters of very high intelligence and those scenes would just go way over my head and came across quite dull as I couldn’t understand half of what they said. Chapters would be dedicated to these scientific debates and I got bored of those chapters quite quickly.

To me this was a slow burn of a book, I was always really enjoying it but I never had a moment of a sucker-punch WOW moment. It just grew on me slowly and when I finished it I just sat there and thought that was such a good book! This book was consistent, apart from the science debates, I loved every moment of this book and enjoyed picking back up everytime!

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