After reading a few other books by Sarah Lotz I can definitely say I’m hooked!

This isn’t a love story. This is Impossible. It starts off with an email exchange where you’re trying to figure out who’s who.

 I’m Bee. You’re N.B.
 Strangers on the Interwebs. That way if we ever need each other, we’ll have plausible deniability 😉

Nick: Failed writer. Failed husband. Dog owner. He edits books for a living and sometimes almost rewrites the contents.

Bee: Serial (or equal opportunities) dater. Dress maker. Pringles enthusiast. She repurposes wedding dresses into something else. Why not reuse the most expensive dress of your life?

One day, their paths cross over a misdirected email. The connection is instant, electric. They feel like they’ve known each other all their lives.

But right from the start, there was no doubt that N.B. and I had a good thing going: an instant ease between us, a lack of judgment that was both fun and freeing, and an unspoken pact to avoid thorny topics or anything too personal—no relationship or sex stuff.

They seem to get along real fine but there are a few red flags that Bee is noticing but deciding to ignore. Nick never heard of Tinder. His relationship status is unclear. And then he drops the bomb that he’s older and already has a marriage under his belt. Next few chapters alternate between Bee and Nick, his and hers point of view as they ponder over their “relationship” or even if there is one to begin with.

Fifty waved at me with age-spotted hands, inviting me to join it in another decade of being subpar. […] Nor, thank Christ, had I given in to the temptation of going into too much detail about my failing marriage. I had enough loyalty to Poll to refrain from doing that. Except, of course, for the “living with a stranger” shocker. And really, was that even true? She was still the same Poll. I was the stranger. A stranger on the brink of an emotional affair. Which didn’t elicit the level of guilt it deserved; pathetically, because the novelty of anyone, even a stranger, enjoying my company trumped everything else.

To make it fair on him, Nick wasn’t the only one thinking of an emotional affair. His wife, Poll, was already in cahoots with Nick’s friend – going on for a year. Now that Nick has the green light to be as involved as he wants with Bee, they tentatively discuss happiness and love.

Here’s a question: how do you know that you’re in love? Not the boring scientific version that everyone knows—dopamine, serotonin etc. The other, less tangible stuff.

You can’t stop thinking about the other person. You want to be around them all the time.
They stop you feeling lonely. They have your back.
OK, I’ve got one. It feels like coming home.

Nick buys a new suit, gets on a train. Bee steps away from her desk, sets off to meet him under the clock at Euston station.

Think you know how the rest of the story goes? They did too . . .

But this is a story with more twists than most. This is Impossible.

The thing that makes this book unique is its writing style. Bee is so modern, you can totally feel her Londoner vibe, her down-to-earth approach to dating and love.

I used to have rules about this: no bios with ab pics; no sunglasses or fancy cars; no group pics; no pics of dogs or food designed to lure in the emotionally damaged—but all those went out the window. It became a game. I swiped on bios containing the word “playa”; the profiles of shirtless twenty-somethings leaning against Porsches; the moodily awful posed black-and-white pics, and one that was merely a photo of an ice-cream sundae from “Sam 43,” captioned with: “Let me feed you.” As bios went, it was up there with the creepiest, and reminded me of that German man who’d advertised for someone to eat him (literally eat him, I mean). The dopamine hit as each match came in did help a little, although ninety percent of my picks’ opening gambits were just emojis or the word “HEY.” Creepy Sam 43 only stood out because he’d bothered to type a semi-sentence:
The grammar was off, but who cared? Not me.


The epistolary nature via e-mails of all things, the references to Bowie, BoJack Horseman, Netflix, the Pandemic, Brexit – all of these put the book solidly in the 2020’s and is a great piece of life as it is now. And what’s keeping Bee and Nick away from each other? They don’t actually reside in the same physical space. They are part of a multi-verse glitch where the emails bind them.

        In short: her world was technologically more advanced; mine was greener (<You really banned ALL plastic?> <Yep. In 2001>). Both worlds were poisoned with racism, sexism, social and gender inequalities, and capitalism, albeit with subtle differences (due to the social stigma attached to being a sociopathic greedy bastard, we had fewer billionaires). We had Universal Basic Income (<Wow!> <yeah, not really—300 euros doesn’t go far>). (Bee would eventually sum up my reality as “Quaker capitalism with a side order of socialism.”) We both had Google and the Net (obviously), but in Bee’s world, it wasn’t subject to reams of privacy legislation

The book is really, really interesting in its first half. The love story, the emotional aspect that binds two lonely people together, is done amazingly well. The Doppelganger operation where they try to meet their in-world counterparts is a bit of hit and miss with me and I have to agree with Leila on this. Dating someone when you have insider knowledge of their life and they have none of yours feels stalker-ish and manipulative.

Bee and Nicholas (the Nick of her verse), hit it off quite well and they seem to have a good thing going that even leads to marriage. The sickly part is that Bee also maintains an emotional affair with Nick of the multi-verse and while they’re the same person, is it cheating if their personalities are different? I think the same question was asked when The Time Traveller’s Wife came out.

The book flounders towards the middle and end as they have no clear way of being together other than some hear-say about a coma possibly connecting the two people after a glitch. Nick gets beaten up and put into a coma after he slept with his married landlady and we don’t actually know if it’s him or Nicholas that Bee meets at the train station. I don’t think it is but the author left it open-ended enough. I had to read and re-read the last paragraph to try to make out via the writing style and the language if it’s Nick or Nicholas she is dating. That’s the only reason I took off a star.

Otherwise, stellar writing and I can’t wait to see what other books she has written.