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The clever format of this book—one character with four different lives—is the draw to this book. It's a huge book, with my hardcover copy of 866 pages, but it's not only long but dense. The sentences run on and on, and the reader can't escape from the strings of words, the story of Archie Ferguson, the stories of the Archie Fergusons, wound around the story of America in the 60's. Oddly, the Archies all seem equally plausible, a boy who adores his father or a boy estranged from his father, a boy who loves Amy or a boy who befriends Amy, all the ways that life can weave and jump and pop and skip equally true and possible. I don't think I've ever come to know a single character as well as I have Archie Ferguson, and I honestly wish I didn't know him as well as I've come to know him, with some versions speaking cruel words and severing ties with others, and some versions committing destructive acts with terrible results. It was a marathon of a read; I'm both glad I read it alongside some other version of myself who is glad she didn't.