I watched the movie before the book on this one, which I almost never do, and I think it’s the reason I stuck with the structure long enough to fall for it. Six stories, each cut in half, nested inside each other like a set of dolls, so you read the first half of story one, then story two, all the way to story six sitting whole in the center, and then you climb back out through the second halves in reverse order. On paper that sounds like a gimmick. In practice, once you’re deep enough in, it becomes the whole point, the way a small detail from Adam Ewing’s 19th century sea journal turns up as a half-remembered fragment in Sonmi-451’s future, a soul or a birthmark or a phrase echoing forward through five other lives.

The voices are the real achievement here, more than the structure honestly, Mitchell writes a Belgian composer’s diary and a corporate thriller and a post-apocalyptic pidgin narrator and they don’t sound like the same author wearing different hats, they sound like six different people. Frobisher’s letters were my favorite of the six, there’s something about a broke, brilliant, doomed young composer scheming his way into a dying master’s household that I found more moving than the flashier future-set sections.

I’ll admit the diversity critique some readers raise has stuck with me since I first heard it, that the book performs a kind of global scope without always earning the specificity underneath it, and I think that’s fair to sit with rather than wave away. It doesn’t undo what the book does well, but it’s a real seam, not an invented one.

Reread it once already, a few years after the first pass, and it held up completely, which is rare for something this structurally showy. If you bounce off the first forty pages, which a lot of people do, push through to the second story before deciding. That’s where it starts actually singing.