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“This book contains pregnancy loss, depictions of disordered eating behaviours, including methods, and details of sexual violence.” it also mentions cheating. Now, these aren't mentioned right away in the book, and I believe they should. Yes, you're reading a book written by a former doctor, but if you are sensitive to those sorts of things, then it's best to know before diving too deep into a book.

I believe the book is mostly a re-telling of the author's life that includes part before they became a doctor, training to be a doctor, working as a doctor, and as a former doctor. So, if you're looking for a book more about being in the hospital, then start with the author's first book.

As always with this author, read their annotations, as it makes the book better. Reading on an eReader can help with this. However, there are still many funny passages, “And finally my dream was fulfilled. Well, someone’s dream, but … whatever.”, or, “At the time, I felt like reminding them that I hadn’t actually been to medical school yet, so how about they let me in, and I’d get back to them in six years?”.

“so much human behaviour would seem like a very bad idea if boiled down to a list of pros and cons. Getting married, for example. Gym membership. The government. A quick drink after work. But despite what medicine may have taught me, not everything can come down to a logical list of benefits and risks. It’s all outweighed by a strange intangible – call it love if you want, call it your brainstem, call it a primal urge – but it’s big, and it’s unknowable, and it’s real.”

I do like how the author ends the book, “The best you can hope for in life is that you leave behind a legacy that makes this world a better place for someone, somewhere, in whatever small way you can.”

The author of the book is pro CIA, which they sort of mentioning in the beginning when it mentions “The material in this book has been reviewed and approved by the CIA.”

That doesn't mean the author doesn't take opportunities to mention times when they hated working for the CIA, such as “It surprised me that an organization that relied so heavily on the absolute loyalty of its employees, such as the CIA, would be so thoroughly unimpressed by my sense of obligation to my students.”

Lindsay does include thing's that other books don't, such as “As we celebrated, however, Brenda brooded over the injustices that had been wreaked upon her. She kept a careful record of her bruises and, weeks later, would threaten to sue the Agency, thereby eliminating the POW exercise for future trainees.”

Of course, the only reason Lindsay even had time to write this book was because she left the CIA, “In the aftermath of September 11, I should have felt motivated to be a better case officer. But the actions, or lack thereof, of the CIA had caused me to lose faith altogether.”

Overall, not my favourite book about the CIA. It does include details I sometimes found irrelevant. While this book can add to your knowledge, I would suggest starting with a different one.

This book does have a couple of instances of swearing.

It feels so wrong, yet so right to read this book.

If you think you've read and watched everything else related to Ed Snowden, then you're missing an important piece. The box. Which this book tells all about.

“the focus of our book was the human relationships that shepherded Snowden’s box — rather than the material inside”

How much of this story is actually true? That I don't know, but as the book mentions,

“systems are only as reliable as the people who operate them. “When it all boils down to it,” he concluded, “it is all about personal trust.””

Stories are a great way to hook someone in, and it's interesting the approach that this book took.

““Thanks for making me laugh so hard,” Laura wrote to both of us the next day. It was the last time I’d laugh for a while.”

It's fascinating how the book is structured, telling the main story first, then adding details, then talking about US history and the future.

If you aren't interested in US history, or the US in general, then I feel you can finish the book once the author's dive into that. I felt they expanded too far away from “the box”, and they had to fill the book to be a certain number of pages.

“Society evolves when people can test boundaries and experiment with ways of living outside the mainstream. In a climate of total surveillance, such innovations would halt. The culture would stagnate and conformity would reign.”

“It also reflected what I consider to be one of the great lessons of adulthood: that most of the institutions and endeavors we regard as ironclad — from parenting to politics — are actually held together with chewing gum and duct tape. Nothing truly works, at least not for long, or not in the way it’s supposed to.”

The book does have multiple instances of swearing, people do die (which is mentioned in the description, but sometimes the book goes into detail), sexual acts, and killing someone. Rated 3.75 (which I rounded down to 3.5).

I found it hard to start this book, as the introduction was boring, but it did provide some context of what's to come.

“Jacob squinted. “What’s the point?” Lauren shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”

There were many instances of the book going into tons of detail, which sometimes was helpful to be able to visually see what's going on. However, in multiple cases, it felt like the author was adding padding to the book to make it longer.

“The book, Lauren realized, didn’t just preserve knowledge; it preserved their past selves, captured them in amber. But their identities weren’t set in stone. They were changing whether they wanted to or not, just as the world outside had changed.”

“Lauren clenched her teeth and sunk deeper into her chair, wishing herself five or ten minutes into the future”

There is a one chapter in the book, where the author switches from present to past in the middle of the chapter. It was very confusing, and I felt I had to stop reading to full understand the switch. I wish the author did a better job with the switch.

When reading I felt the book was going to end a certain way, however, there is a big twist within the last few chapters. After I started reading that, I just wanted to finish the book. Thanks to the author for ending the book the way they did.

““Hello,” he said. “My name is Tristan Brandt. I’ve been waiting for you.””

Got this book for free as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. This is my honest review and nobody (the author, publisher or LibraryThing) has read this review before it went public.

I DNF'd at the beginning of chapter 8 due to the book being slow in pace, and not very interesting in general. It wasn't because of the details, which I felt there was the right amount of. It could be because there were so many stories that took place and I just wanted the main story to get to a certain point without feeling like I'm missing a huge ton.

I'm not sure how I feel about the prologue, if you read the book description you almost don't need this, but it also somewhat feels like skipping ahead.

Another point about all the stories, it was hard to tell when one story stopped and another continued. And many of these stories continued throughout the book, which meant you had to keep reading to know what's going to happen, and know when the book went back to the side story.

If you like hearing about long bike rides or overcoming challenges, the struggles while doing them, long adventures, imposter syndrome, or failure, then you will like this book. It also touches on travel and food if you're also into that.

"The arrival of a friend made me feel a little more like I belonged here"

If you aren't from the UK or in the biking community, there may be words you don't know and that a dictionary may not be able to tell you, so don't worry if you struggle.

"Often, when I read of a new round-the-world record, or when a roadie friend would boast about the 200km sportive he was training for that summer, I would think of the audaxers, many of whom will quite happily cover 400 miles in a weekend, before heading back to work on Monday morning, simply because they claim to enjoy it."

This is one of those books that has certain parts that suck you in, and you want to continue reading, so keep an eye on the time.

"I was still doing it, I reminded myself. As long as I kept moving forward, even if I was walking, even if I had to stop every five minutes, I was still in the race, and I would make it to the top of the mountain, no matter how long it took."

"Anticipating the moments of panic I knew I’d experience later on in the ride, when I’d convince myself that I was a failure and didn’t even deserve to be there, I told myself that, as long as I was riding my bike, however slowly, I was doing it, and I was on my way to finishing the Transcontinental, no matter how long that might take."

While I understand why certain stories were included, I felt some could have been removed to shorten the book or make it easier to keep track of everything.

There is a very sudden end to this book before the epilogue.

"people would find my persistence inspiring if I carried on regardless. I didn’t tell her that the very thought of that made my stomach clench."

"You’ve done things your way for your entire life. Why not try something different? A lasting, loving relationship may very well be waiting for you on the other end."

The author does have a bias (worked at Google before working on this book, and worked at Hinge after submitting it) but does provide good advice.

You will want to make notes / highlight, and sometimes there is a quiz, so will want a way to write something down.

"You need to put in effort to find someone."

"No relationship is easy all the time. Even the healthiest, most rewarding marriages require effort. Finding someone can be hard, but often the real challenge comes later. The hard part is the daily work you put in to grow and sustain a great relationship."

While the book does feel geared a bit more towards women, anyone of any gender I believe can make use of this book. It is geared towards those who have more dating experience and are extroverts, but anyone can get useful advice from this book.

"But what you really want to look for is somebody who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic."

There is humour injected multiple times in this book, which keeps the book from becoming too serious.

"Of course! Cue the Céline Dion soundtrack!"

Wonder what your life would be like if you had done one thing differently? Unfortunately that currently isn't possible, but through this book you can through Nora, her life, and her different lives.

"Now, you have to decide how you want to live."

"Because, Nora, sometimes the only way to learn is to live"

The book starts off with a number of quotes, then I found it went weird. It's hard to explain, and early on I wondered why the author chose to go this way.

Since there are multiple characters at many points in the book, it can be difficult to know who is saying what.

There are some chapters or parts that I felt could have been removed all together, and the book overall would be the same. Sometimes the book felt wordy, or felt like I was reading a page filler.

"The quiet made her realise how much noise there was elsewhere in the world."

At multiple points while reading, I wondered, how is the book going to continue with x number of pages left?

At the beginning of many lives, there are tons of talking to figure out what's going on in that life, and as the book progresses you are just told about certain things happen. I'm not sure if the author did this to shorten the number of pages, or because they knew you would only need to know about certain things.

"This was a new feeling – as if she was taking someone’s place"

The book does have a couple of frightening moments, which do help to ensure the book doesn't get too boring, however some may find it stops them from continuing to read.

"that you can choose choices but not outcomes"

If you want to read a book about the author, life in the war, or NASA (including one of the original astronauts and how his life was changed), then this book is one to add to your list. Deke passed away due to a brain tumour in 1993, this book was published in 1994.

"until I was in my thirties, I was always Don Slayton. Nobody called me Deke until I became a test pilot at Edwards in the 1950s"

Content warning for this book: war, death

As always with older books, some words have a different meaning today, or you would use something else. That doesn't take away too much from the book, but it may make you stop and wonder what the author means.

"It was maybe sixty hours from the Agena failure to White House approval. That was how things got done in those days."

This book is heavy detailed, which can be great for some but a slow read for others. Skipping some of the details doesn't detract from the overall book.

"In those days we did all our academic work—running all our performance numbers—on little hand calculators or slide rules. Today guys in test pilot school are sitting there with laptops. They can do more real-time calculating in five minutes than we could do in a six-month course."

"Marge got the idea that it might be good if everyone got to know each other better, so she organized the Astronaut Wives Club with Frank Borman’s wife, Sue"

The beginning of many chapters were weird, after a bit you realized they were quotes from someone in Deke's life. I don't think those quotes needed to be there, as they didn't add to the current point in the story.

The book does touch on some things that could have been different if x happened. And it touches on the highs and lows. It also just ends, then going into quotes of praise and acknowledgements.

"But that made five funerals in one year"

"Someone took a picture of me dozing at the console at the one-hundred-hour point in the mission. My own copy has an inscription from Jim, Jack, and Fred “thanking” me for my attention."

"People think that being an astronaut is all flying missions, but most of the job was just tedious work"

Disclosure: I got this ebook for free from BookSirens. In return I was asked to provide a private review to the author of this book and could publish my review anywhere I liked. The author nor BookSirens has any say in my review, this is my honest review of the book.

This is the first book of a great series, I just know it. Of course what happens has to involve multiple people to keep the story interesting (I'm keeping it vague on purpose to not spoil anything). The reporter James is involved from beginning to end, and while many other people come into the story they don't make as big an impact as James does.

"She shifted in her seat. ‘What’s a warrant?’ James’s eyes bulged. So the ... weren’t above taking advantage of a naïve twenty-year-old."

I do think the author could have left out some of the other characters as some of them you only hear about from time to time, or they are only there for a chapter then no referenced again.

At one point the book vaguely mentions bias, and it made me think about the times when my unconscious bias took over my train of thought.

James has a deadline he has to make, which allows this book to have a beginning and end. Otherwise it could seem like the book could go on forever. The way the book wraps up allows for a solid ending and allows you to finish the book without making you think about what could happen next.

"She’s better off not knowing the truth."

I had never heard about this author before reading the book and now I'm interested to read her blog to read some of her other travel adventures in detail (since the book could only cover so much).

What would you do if you decided to quit your comfy life and travel full-time with no end date in sight? That is what Kim and Brian (her husband) did. But just before they go on their travel they are given an yellow envelope from a friend which has money in it and they are told to give away the money following the three rules (don't overthink it, share your experiences if you want, don't feel pressed to give it all away). Which may seem easy but it's hard especially since you are travelling.

If you are thinking or dreaming about travelling for a length of time that doesn't have an end time, or you are no wanting to do what all the tourists do then consider reading this book.

The pacing felt right, the author in some spots could have kept going on in more detail but didn't.

The book begins with a story then later in the book it comes back to that story, which felt confusing and I had to stop reading and try to figure out what part of the story I was in. Once I did I almost wanted to go back and read the story at the beginning again to get context.

I do hope the author writes another book which I liked her style of writing.

There are some awesome quotes that come from this book (which may have some spoilers):

"Even if we were doing some irrevocable damage to our futures by taking this trip, at least the yellow envelope guaranteed that something good would come out of it."

"It dawned on me that I was doing that annoying thing that tourists do when they’re trying to speak to someone in a foreign country. I talked slowly and emphatically, though not, unfortunately, in the native language."

"But even if it was, I just couldn’t help myself, because I was overcome with an incredible sense of freedom. Standing there in the middle of a little Ecuadorian town, sopping wet and laughing, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever felt so alive."

"Finally, one of them said, with a bit of condescension, “Kim’s never made a mistake in her life.” At the time I’d shrugged off the comment, but I couldn’t let it go. It haunted me as I lay in bed at night dreaming of changing my life. My coworker had been wrong about me. I’d made the biggest mistake of all: I’d spent my entire life playing it safe."

"It was stupid to think that there was some grand purpose for my life. All I wanted was to close my eyes and wake up in my own bed, take a shower in my own bathroom and have an easy life again."

"I wondered if maybe that wasn’t a blessing. The teams ahead of us were cruising along without problems, but they were missing out on something incredible: the extraordinary kindness that appeared out of nowhere each time that we broke down."

"But I was angry too. Because I didn’t want it to be the way it was. I wanted it to be easy. I wanted to be happy. But I’d ignored the truth, and it’d gotten me nowhere."

"Those things had always been there! But I had never seen them. The same was true of everything in my life. I’d upturned so many rocks, scavenged like the starving for the missing pieces of myself, just to learn that I’d held them all along."

"“This would be a good time to have an invisibility cloak,” said Brian, as he slung his backpack onto his shoulders."

"It occurred to me that so many of those vacationers never left home, even while away. They wanted the comforts of home repackaged in a foreign land. They had traveled to a different country, but they wanted to stay in a world they knew. Travelers wanted to enter other worlds. That was the difference."

"More than once I’d lamented to Brian about how backward I thought it was that our culture accepted that people spent lots of money on houses and new cars and buried themselves under mountains of debt but that saving up a modest pile of cash and then spending it on traveling could be considered irresponsible and selfish."

"Our yellow envelope donations were not changing the world, but I hoped that by doing something intentional and kind, no matter how small, they might change the energy that the recipient released into it. "

3.75/5 (rounding the whole star rating to 4)

If you haven't read the first two books in this series then this book and review won't make sense. This review may contain spoilers of those books in the series, but won't contain any spoilers for this book.

The chapters allow the author to indicate some time has passed, but no indication is given of how long, or exactly what happening.

I would suggest having a dictionary (either physical or virtual) nearby when reading this book as there were a number of words that I had to look up the definition to, in order to fully understand what was happening. I can imagine the author did this to keep you in the time frame that this book takes place.

There are a number of parts where the characters get emotional and the author does a great job allowing the reader to fully understand the emotion.

This book takes a different path from the first book in the series, I would have thought that Esme got back into being a 'decoy woman' but instead the author decided to get Esme to do something else.

While this story isn't 100% accurate of the time frame, it does allow the read to get a sense of what was happening during the war.

"You know I can’t tell you that."

"For heaven’s sake, Esme, I’m in the War Office. My clearance exceeds yours by some leagues."

"‘I’m sorry you can’t tell them more,’ Richard said. ‘Deceiving those close to you is a sordid business"

The author included the main characters inner dialogue a number of time in the book, which allows the reader to get a better sense of them and what they are thinking. I would have loved the author to included more of it and from other characters.

Overall, a great ending to the series.

"With the shroud of her grief blurring her judgement, she had seized upon the chance to escape into a world of fantasy, where there was no need to confront the enormity of [...] ."

Disclosure: I got this ebook from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers in exchange for an honest review. Nobody (the author, publisher, or LibraryThing) has read this review before I posted it publicly.

I DNF'd at 47% read. There are parts of the book that I liked, but I couldn't continue to read because of certain things.

There are things you may read that seem to make no sense at that time, but they may make sense later. There are also so many details that you can really visualize what's going on. The author does include some good humour and moments that you will read then say "what!?". I'm going to be purposefully vague regarding this as I don't wish to spoil certain parts of the book.

“It certainly will be convenient. Gosh, I wish this worked on real languages. High school Spanish would have been a breeze.”

The author is very good about ending chapters on cliffhangers, that way you will want to continue to read and know what will happen.

Since this is the first book in the series, I can assume the author will continue with more books, and as reading you will have some ideas on what the author could cover.

It's interesting how the author approaches 'fight or flight' and 'friendship'.

“I’m sure the first time will be scary, but they didn’t hire you because they thought you couldn’t do the job”.

However, now we come to why I couldn't finish the book. I did skip over many pages as I felt they took away from the main story and were page fillers. The author does include some words that may be different depending on where in the world you are (such as runner).

While I'm sure there are people who will love this book and series, the combination of very intense (and potentially scary) moments and page fillers got me to stop reading. If you do like those (including a series that could drag a story across many books) then read this book.

"She slid the wooden handle from between his fingers, staring down at it. “What am I supposed to do with this?” “Bite it.”"