Some Laneys Died - Book Review

Some Laneys Died by Brooke Skipstone is a novel about a 16-year-old girl named Delaney whose mind is a blizzard of counterfactual thoughts.  Delaney is addicted to chronicling the events in her life as they happen and often penning multiple versions of the event. As her story unfolds, she discovers that many of the things that she is convinced have happened around her didn’t occur in the way she remembered or recorded it.  Delaney finds physical proof that contradicts her memory or friends tell her an entirely different version of the same event and how they remembered her participation and reaction to it. Is she having a mental breakdown, or is what she feels and remembers the result of a leakage from another universe of an alternate Delaney experiencing the same event?

The book is written from Delaney’s viewpoint in the 1st person.  She experiences a world riddled with paradoxes that she finds more and more baffling. As she sorts through her memories, she tries to decide if they are real, hallucinations, or signs of a young woman going insane. Strange events happen that convince her to reunite with her father in Alaska because she fears what might happen between her and her mother’s boyfriend and his son. She also hopes that the change in environments will help her understand these dizzying trips within the various realities she’s experienced.

She describes her struggles with reality and how it might have been different if only she had made different choices at the various junctures of the happenings.  At age thirteen, she catches her father having sex with an unknown woman. She has the option of keeping it a secret or telling her mother. Her choice of telling her mother and the subsequent dissolution of her parents’ marriage was a result of her father’s indiscretion or her action of telling her mother?  The novel is full of these experiences of quantum consciousness – counterfactual events.  Skipstone’s story introduces us to an exciting and enticing topic about other intertwined dimensions, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories, and alternate outcomes of shared events.  Some Laneys Died examines the belief that our reality — our universe the way we experience it — might not be the only version of events out there.

Delaney is also discovering her sexuality and struggling with what she is comfortable with and what she finds perverted or sickening sex to her.  Living in these different realms causes her to experience versions of herself in sexual episodes that she finds disturbing. Did she have sex with this person or not?   Then something new happens, a boy, Caden, who was in the event that was the genesis of her counterfactual thoughts suddenly appears in her current life, but she feels what she remembers about him supposedly never happened in her current reality. Did he skip out of her alternative dimension and enter her current universe?  Caden is not the nicest guy in the world, and he may have even kidnapped a doppelganger of Delaney, or maybe that event is just a hallucination. As you read Some Laneys Died, you will be constantly given situations where you’ll try to discern if they are real or just a figment of Laney’s imagination.

Some Laneys Died is a story where a killer can skip out of one universe and endanger those in another universe.  The book is a fascinating but disquieting narration about dreams, stories within stories, sexual awakening, and feeling the emotions of love, fear, passion, sadness, guilt, pain, and desire of another version of yourself in an alternative experience.   In this highly entertaining and well-crafted tale . . . Skipstone has hit all the notes in her latest thriller.