DNF at 42%

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for providing me an eARC.

I'm so upset because the cover is gorgeous and the premise sounded really interesting.

It's very much trying to fit in the same category as The Starless Sea or Stephanie Garber's works with the whimsy and kind of absurdist jumping from place to place, "just go with it" vibes, but unfortunately it holds none of the same charm.

The first couple of chapters were pretty interesting, a pawn shop that is hidden behind the door to a ramen restaurant and that takes regrets from their clients. Main character Hana is about to step up as manager when her dad retires, but her first morning she finds the shop ransacked and her father missing. The messaging about fate and choices was rubbing me the wrong way, but I thought that was where the character growth was going to come in.

But then the love interest was introduced and the adventure started. The characters show absolutely no depth and their instalove had me gagging. Each scene is Hana taking Kei to a new place via some different method, jumping thrpugh a puddle, through a dream, through a song. They meet some new character that gives them next to no clues and then they're travelling to some other place with the flimsiest connections that Hana seems to be pulling out of her ass! And Kei is all on board for seemingly no reason other than he's in love with Hana (again, I don't know why).

When they make it to a museum with an exhibit of moments of human mistakes and it brings up

the Titanic, a failed assassination of Hitler, and Kokura (the original target of the bomb that hit Nagasaki)

all within a page or two, I gave up. I don't know what the author was trying to do using those examples but to say

referencing the Titanic, that one crewman failing to turn over his keys to the locker where the binoculars were kept and therefore the man replacing him didnt see the iceberg in time; "fifteen seconds cost one thousand five hundred people their lives."

seems irresponsible. The other two anecdotes are true but not something I had ever heard or looked into before, but the one above is disputed in how much it contributed. In any case, boiling these horrific events to one moment or one mistake, even if probably other related moments existed in the museum, is bonkers! I was already struggling through the boring characters and stupid romance but this soured the rest of the book for me.