Mild spoilers ahead. This is an amazing book. It is one of the most interesting twists on time-travel that I have had the pleasure of reading. The recursive plot and changing storylines were truly fascinating (but relatively easy to follow, even as an audiobook). As a developmental psychologist, I enjoyed considering how one person's life (and the person himself) can turn out differently with different key experiences. I was also fascinated by how the older Henrys' memories would change and loved thinking about that aspect of the book. Henry's obsession with music and sound is a powerful theme, and since reading this book, I have begun to pay more attention to the "symphony" of sound that surrounds us at all times. I only wish I had connected more emotionally with the main characters (Henry/Gabe/Val) but wonder if it was because I was so overly intrigued and busy thinking about the time travel and its implications. ( )

The Lost Boys Symphony/Mark Ferguson Wow. Having finished this book, I'm honestly unsure how I feel. I'm unsure who I was rooting for, or what I wanted to happen, or what I expected to happen. This book never seemed to have a logical path and in that I was both surprised and not surprised by each event that happened in this book.
 
Firstly, a note of clarification. I've been dying to read this book ever since I read its blurb, but I feel like the blurb was a tad misleading--Val is not lost in the traditional sense of the word; she is only lost to Henry, and Henry's sanity is a little questionable. With that in mind, this book is equally about Val, Gabe, and Henry (though Henry is multiple characters in himself), and the relationship between the three and the pairs that make them up. It's about them, about love and the ties that bind more than it is about time travel, and its about the different paths life can take and how these paths intermingle.
 
The three characters didn't really play on my emotions at all. I could relate to Val and Gabe a lot, especially the rollercoaster of emotions they went through--at multiple points I could sympathise so hard. All three of them seemed kind of lost in this world, and Val notices this at the beginning. She tries to fix it by leaving Henry, and while her decision makes sense, I'm not sure if she found what she was looking for in leaving him or at any point afterwards. I'd have liked a little more day-to-day information about them, as I didn't feel like I knew them very well. I did enjoy the little backstory we got of them in high school, meeting.
 
There's a really intriguing circle going on. Henry at 80 discovers time travel first and comes for 41, and with each decision a younger version of themselves make their memories seem to be overridden, but each decision has consequences of epic proportions. The plot of this book isn't quite linear--though are books with time travel ever?--but certain events drive it forward.
 
Ultimately, I think Henry acts both very selfishly and very selflessly, and shows that it's the quality of life that really matters. It also made me think about memory and how life occurs in the past, in the memory, and how easily events and people can be erased from the world's collective memory.
 
While I wasn't as enthralled as I thought I'd be based on the blurb, I do recommend this book. It was well put together and definitely went in ways that surprised and intrigued me. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, or if I feel very strongly at all, but it's well worth a read and I'm looking forward to anything other novels Ferguson might write. I want all my friends to read this so I can discuss and dissect this book, and I'll probably read it again as I think there were some nuances that I missed that pull this story even more tightly together. The chapter titles, in particular, were exquisite.
 
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

I tried. I really tried. I got about a third of the way in, then gave up.

I wanted to like this book. I think the basic plot idea is phenomenal. But the writing just dragged, and the characters were boring as fuck.

This novel arrives using the currently fashionable format of alternating chapters between two more or less linked stories. Here the first is a conventional, rather trite, college friends romantic triangle which is leavened by the alternate story, a journey into the world of one of them who suffers delusions where he is bedevilled by his hearing of a disturbing music of the spheres and, more importantly for the plot, alter egos from various periods of his life who keep pressing him to change various things which have happened in his past. This sounds innovative, and to a point it is, but this sort of new agey premise involving alternative courses of life triggered by random, seemingly trivial decisions is ground that to me was pretty well-furrowed by a spate of books and films treating it around the turn of the century, and I didn't really want to invest the amount of mental effort that would have been needed to grasp the extremely involuted ideas being thrown around by hallucinations in support of a way of looking at life that I consider fanciful at best, delusional at worst, and for which I have very little buyin; I've never believed that the course of empires is determined by whether I lunch at Elaine's or stick a frozen pizza in the oven. It doesn't help that said alter egos too often take off on an anti-abortion screed; I didn't really get this book to find out what the author thinks about that particular controversy, especially when the intellectual rigor devoted to it is approximately equal to the billboards I see when I drive into town. Of course, the fact that I didn't pay a lot of attention meant that I didn't really understand the conclusion, which is surely my bad, but for me this tome was a waste of time. ( )

I enjoyed the way music, or more precisely, arrangements of sound, figured prominently in the story. The way sounds coalesced and affected the main character, who had some characteristics of having a sensory disorder, was wonderfully and imaginatively portrayed.

The novel reminded me of Donnie Darko in the way it offered an explanation for mental illness as an aberration brought on by time travel. It also reminded me of Primer, and I eventually reacted in a similar way to this novel as I did to the protagonists in that film. I became impatient with the many versions of Henry's self, and I lost interest in how the paradoxes would work themselves out, because these machinations eventually got in the way of the story having any deeper meaning for me. ( )