She was searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s. What she discovered, however, was a new technology with the potential to change the world and everyone’s place within it. Gabrielle White is a scientist and the mother of an 11-month-old little girl she and her husband lovingly refer to as “the Kat” when she accidentally thrusts her consciousness into her husband’s body, becoming him and yet still herself. She calls her discovery “the flash,” and with it, she’ll be able to provide her daughter a future she once could only dream of, as long as she controls how her new technology is introduced into the world.
Flash-forward twenty years, and the world has been revolutionized. Gone are the days of paying hundreds of dollars to travel across the world in an airplane. Instead, traveling to anyplace in the world is as easy as sending your consciousness into the host body of someone already there. With the flash, you can experience things people never dreamed possible, and the opportunities are endless. This is the promise of Anyone, the large company behind flash technology. “Be anyone with anyone” is their motto.
But a world with the flash isn’t the world the flash’s creator envisioned, and a desperate woman named Annami finds herself in a dangerous fight for her life in the seedy underbelly of a world driven by flash technology, an illegal operation known as the Dark Share. Annami doesn’t know what the people do who flash into her body when she Dark Shares, but she knows she needs the money it provides. And she needs a lot of it because Annami knows something about Anyone that no one else knows, something that will once again change everything, and she’ll risk anything to expose it.
Anyone, the second novel by lawyer-turned-writer Charles Soule, grabbed my attention on the very first page and didn’t let go until the surprising conclusion on the last page. It’s the kind of story that keeps you up at night for just a few minutes longer when you should be going to sleep because you have to go to work early the next morning, which makes it the best kind of novel.
I discovered Charles Soule when he began writing the Star Wars: Darth Vader comic book for Marvel Comics. I’ve loved Star Wars since I was a child, and I had high hopes for the story of Anakin Skywalker’s early experiences as the Dark Lord of the Sith, and Soule’s treatment of Vader was truly groundbreaking. After that, I read some of Soule’s other Star Wars comics before reading his first novel Oracle Year.
Oracle Year was fantastic, but the premise of Anyone didn’t actually appeal to me at first. However, I’ve come to enjoy Soule’s style of writing, so I decided to try it out. I wasn’t expecting to be caught up in not just one, but two stories that are both gut-wrenchingly tragic and intricately plotted.
I’ve been a fan of non-linear stories ever since LOST, and Anyone’s non-linear plot reminded me a lot of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which is one of my favorite novels of all time. The story shifts between Gabrielle White’s discovery and fight to develop the flash technology and Annami’s tragic story in a world revolutionized by two decades of the flash. Non-linear stories that focus on two different characters run the risk of losing reader interest after shifting to a different story. Shifts in point-of-view are why I was never able to get beyond a hundred pages or so of A Game of Thrones. I just found some character’s scenes nowhere near as interesting as others, so I’d struggle to read through one character’s story when I was desperate to get back to a story I enjoyed more.
Anyone wasn’t like that. Whenever the story would shift from Annami’s story back to Gabrielle’s story, I was ready to get back to Annami’s story, but I was also caught up in the progression of Gabrielle’s story, and vice versa. And Soule did a masterful job of weaving the two stories together, dropping subtle hints of how the two stories are connected throughout.
I won’t give away the end of the story, but my hope is that it’s not over and that Soule has an idea for a sequel. I’m often struck by a sense of bittersweet when I finish a novel I love because I hate that it’s over. I’ve spent so much time with these characters that they don’t feel like imagined people on a page, and the end of a novel means that time spent is over. Finishing Anyone was like that, which is why I can’t wait to read whatever Soule puts out next.
