This book is an absolute mess. There's an interesting story somewhere in here, but it's bogged down by endless repetition and an ending that doesn't answer any questions. The story revolves around a man who seems to be trapped between living in two different worlds. In one world, he's Jezz, a gunner in an army platoon fighting against an alien invasion of Earth by a group of creatures called the Elty'ch. In the other world, he's Jeff, who's basically just some guy going through what seems to be a mental breakdown. Jeff moves in with his step- mother and sister who help take care of him. (Side note: he has a weirdly intimate relationship with his sister—nothing overtly sexual, but the physical affection between the two of them is a bit off-putting for siblings, even if they’re not biologically related.) He also meets a woman named Sal with whom he forms a romantic bond. Right before Jezz/Jeff passes out and switches realities, he sees a hooded pale woman who says something cryptic to him.

In the final chapter, we're suddenly following Dr. Soong, a scientist living on a space station orbiting Earth. We learn that Earth is uninhabitable, seemingly taken over by another ice age. Hundreds of space stations are orbiting around it and every other possible planet and moon in the solar system. Each of these stations hold hundreds of capsules, each containing a human in stasis. The scientists who are living on the stations and not in stasis have been working on a way to keep the stasis humans asleep longer without waking up. Their goal seems to be to keep them asleep indefinitely until they can find or create a habitable living environment for everyone (it's explained that attempts at previous habitats have failed). Everyone on Soong's station seems to correlate with someone in Jezz/Jeff's realities, and at the very end, Soong and his colleagues are forced to wake up a capsule inhabitant--a pale young woman named Jess.

My issues with this book are from both a story perspective and a technical one. From a story perspective, this book literally ends with the "it was all a dream" trope, which means that all the events leading up to the final chapter didn't actually matter. Which reality was real? Neither. Is Jess the pale woman that Jezz/Jeff kept seeing? Maybe. But if that's the case, does that mean Jess was dreaming of herself as two different men in two different worlds, and each of those men were also seeing Jess herself, who kept telling those men to wake up? None of this makes much sense, but more aggravatingly, none of it actually matters.

Every time the pale woman showed up in a Jezz/Jeff chapter, I kept hoping I would actually learn something to move the plot forward, but all the story did was keep repeating the same thing over and over: Jezz/Jeff wakes up in their world, does some stuff, sees the pale woman, passes out, and wakes up in the other world. This is lazy storytelling, and the book could have been cut down by 75% and nothing would have been lost since we don’t actually learn anything about the real person involved in these realities: Jess.

Then there are the technical issues. There were boundless typos throughout the book, but countless times I also ran into a word or phrase where I couldn't tell if it was a typo or if it was simply a saying used in UK English that isn't used in American English. An example of the terrible proofreading was on page 104 (Kindle edition), after Jezz kills an alien and is examining it up close for the first time. He realizes that the alien's upper limbs were ineffectual for hand-to-hand combat, and the author writes, "Either the angle was wrong, or the damned thing was just too weak, but what blows it was landing were negligible." I read that sentence at least five times and I still have no clue what it's supposed to mean.

Another annoyance is that the Kindle version I read didn't have navigable chapters. The book itself has chapters, but on the Kindle the entire story is just one long chapter that doesn’t allow you to skip back and forth. And because the actual book chapters are incredibly long, I never had any idea how much longer I had to read until I could find a good stopping point. This led to me having to stop in the middle of a chapter rather than at a natural break. This can be easily fixed in the electronic file, and it really should be before official publication.

Overall, this was just a very frustrating read from start to finish. I can’t recommend reading it.

The book read like two separate stories with a surprise ending. The switching between the stories seemed to happen too frequently for my reading tastes. Not letting the reader lose themselves in the book. I also highly preferred one story over the other--just personal preference.

The end was decent, a nice surprise. Since the book is written in third person it would have been nice to get a little more backstory with the ending.

The writing was fine. Interesting dialog.

Separate formatting issue - not related to the rating: I read the book on a Kindle app and the indentation on paragraphs was so small that it was hard to distinguish a new scene starting. It was a distraction from the story.

This was a great book until the final chapter which utterly ruins a great book. I'm sorry, you don't get to rug pull and try a twist like that after building up two very good plot lines. The publisher should strike the final chapter and send back for revision.

Thanks for the ARC. No thanks for the awful ending.

Parallels is a thrilling sci-fi adventure that blurs the lines between reality and identity. With fast-paced action and a gripping premise, it keeps you questioning what’s real right until the end.