In a narrative where absolutely anything can happen, does anything matter? This question ran through my head repeatedly as I read Peng Shepherd’s All This and More (2024), a thick, ambitious Choose Your Own Adventure novel for adult, which puts a high-concept spin on the multiverse concept. An enticing set-up leads into a thematically interesting read, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark as a wholly satisfying story.
Marsh is a divorced, middle-aged mother who gave up her dream of becoming a high-powered attorney. Instead, she raised her daughter and enabled her ex-husband, Dylan, to pursue his doctorate. As someone who has never put herself first, she’s overwhelmed when someone else does it for her: she’s selected as the next contestant on a miraculous reality TV show called All This and More. The show leverages bleeding-edge quantum technology to allow people to “revise” their lives, by going into the past to make different choices — an iterative approach to perfecting their very existence. Naturally, Marsh is thrilled for the chance to return to the road not taken, hoping to repair her relationship with Dylan while still pursuing her lofty legal ambitions. But as her baffling, interactive season continues, she finds every choice comes with different drawbacks, and her efforts keep thrusting her into the orbit of an old flame, Ren. Is fate trying to tell her something? Or is there a clandestine writer’s room manipulating her journey? As Marsh incessantly tweaks her life path in search of the perfect result, she starts to lose herself down the rabbit-hole of option paralysis.
All This and More opens briskly, drawing the reader into an inventive, zippy narrative that spins Marsh’s life from mundanity to infinite possibility. The problem is that once Marsh acquires the power to undo her every decision, the decisions increasingly cease to matter. Shepherd attempts to combat this problem with ominous running mysteries, and structures the sprawl with literal page-jumping prompts that give the reader a chance to interact with the text and steer the story. On top of that, there’s a metafictional layer to the show-within-a-novel, as Marsh can access the audience’s running chat history, which occasionally influences her behavior — especially one particular viewer who keeps trying to warn her something is wrong with her quantum bubble. The book — which is physically beautiful, incidentally, with a complex, end-paper map of the chapter titles and their forking timelines — is swinging for the fences in its structural playfulness. All for the good, in theory.
Unfortunately, the execution is wanting. I’ll blame myself, on one level; I refused to get in the spirit of things, reading it straight through without making any decisions. This is what I want from a novel, and I trusted the author would account for that preference; indeed, she rewards it with a comic moment or two. But the main problem (and I’m not convinced “playing ball” would have fixed this) is that Marsh’s initially clear motives grow increasingly incoherent. She gets everything she could ever want out of every timeline she tries — including many she has never expressed any interest in. It looks like an attempt to bend reality ala Everything Everywhere All At Once, but the concept is less effective in prose form. Marsh’s decisions start to come out of left field, and after a while watching her get whatever she wants — and continually reject it! — she grows increasingly whiny and unsympathetic. To a degree, that’s part of the point, but still not terribly enjoyable in the moment.
Ultimately, Shepherd funnels the reader toward one of three official endings. Reading them in succession does deliver an interesting, multifaceted exploration of theme. As a middle-aged person who has failed to achieve their dream job, I have to admit I found the novel thought-provoking, and a good one for me to have read. It made me consider what I would have done differently, given Marsh’s opportunity. The more repetitive, random choices she makes, the more convinced I was that I probably wouldn’t have even wanted to be on the show — which was reaffirming! If only the lesson had come with a more satisfying journey. Alas, beyond an academic appreciation for what is certainly a challenging auctorial exercise, I was never quite sold. Still, much credit is due for the sheer ambition.
