One by one and all at once, I have seen and felt, all the colours of living.
In a Thousand Different Ways
by Cecelia Ahern
Genre: Magical Realism
About: Alice can see the colours of people. Their moods, their lies, their hidden secrets. She didn't ask for this gift, and most days it feels like a curse. As she learns more and more about other people's true nature, she distances herself from everyone and from life.
Thoughts
I absolutely loved the how the colours of people were described and how Alice's abilities change and develop over time. It's very immersive, very complex and the impact it has on Alice is really believable, going deep into psychological issues caused from these powers that allow her to see and feel hidden parts of people's inner emotions.
The story itself is interesting and maps out the majority of Alice's life. I liked many of the characters and how layered the relationships were. Especially the complicated dynamics in her family.
What I didn't like so much was the book's overall pace. I liked spending so much time in Alice's childhood (it's the first third of the novel) but it results in the rest of the novel being a bit disjointed as it goes over her entire adult life in a back and forth timeline. Her romantic interest doesn't turn up until the last third, and close friends are thrown on the reader with no build-up. Best friends and first loves are sprung on us but we don't get the history of how Alice came to know them until later scenes. And towards the end the writing starts to become a lot more poetic and abstract and so significant moments (such as character deaths) are sprinkled in as after thoughts in some cases. These are things Alice knows, the story being her life, but because the timeline is so sporadic for the reader, we don't experience many of those significant moments.
Overall, I loved the concept of this and how well thought out and executed the colour system was. But the pace was a bit off for me.
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