The Next Together- Lauren James

The Next Together- review

Lauren James

Rating: 4/5

The short version: This book juggled a lot of plot and characters, but it broke my heart anyway.

This review will contain spoilers.

Most authors I read try to stick to one genre per novel. Sci-fi, or romance, or mystery, or historical. It’s easy to see why- it could be very difficult to make the different conventions of each genre fit together into one cohesive story. Of course, the best books defy all the conventions and make their stories work anyway. That is what The Next Together does.

There are several different storylines in The Next Together. The main one is the story of Matt and Kate, who discover that several identical versions of themselves have played major roles in different parts of history, and then have to stop a government conspiracy themselves. Three of their other lifetimes are also explored, and each lifetime ends with acts of heroic sacrifice.

What really made me admire this book was how much it takes on. Two different historical eras are explored, and each has to have characters and stories who fit that era (and that’s not even mentioning the research it takes to portray those eras as convincingly as they are portrayed here). As if that wasn’t enough work, the main section of the novel is set in the future, and so James has created a history of Britain for the next twenty years or so. That’s apparent from when Kate remembers that “Scotland had gained independence from England after the last world war”.

Now, it’s not a long book- my edition is less than 350 pages long. When I realised exactly how much it was planning to tackle, no matter how much the premise intrigued me, I had serious doubts. Four separate love stories, eight main characters, and a government conspiracy are a lot to juggle, especially for a debut author. There had to be something which let the book down a little.

There wasn’t.

It did take a lot of concentration to keep the different storylines separate in my head, and it was sometimes jarring to be thrown from one increasingly dangerous situation into a completely different dangerous situation. But through it all, I didn’t lose any of my attachment to the characters.

I love how each love story was clearly focussed around the same people, but how different they were because of their circumstances. Towards the end of the book, when Georgian-era Katherine is confronted with a man who looks like her lover, she notices that “he looked fragile, and softer”. This is quite an unfavourable comparison to her own Matthew, and that is typical of each story- the couples only work with each other.

There are other mysteries built up through the book. I’m not going to talk about them, because part of the joy of this book is being drawn further and further into each of its plot strands. So I’m going to finish this review with two warnings: be ready to have your heart broken multiple times, and be warned that not all the plot strands are wrapped up in the book.