What if

 Do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? How many decisions, large and small, culminated in the now? What if I had gone to that college in another state, left that party 20 minutes earlier, waited another year to have a child? Caught that train instead of the next one?

This week’s challenge opened up a whole new genre for me, and I’m hooked. Alternate history.

It also reintroduced me to Jo Walton -whose novel The Just City I read for the challenge in 2016.

My Real Children is a tale of two Patricias. In one life, she says yes to her first proposal. In her other life, she says no. As elderly woman struggling with dementia, she remembers both just as vividly. In her life in a loveless marriage, she found her passion in advocating for peace. In her life spent with her true love, she must deal with a world plagued by violence.

Walton includes just enough detail from our own historical reality for discrepancies to be shocking. For example, when I read that Jackie Kennedy died along with her husband, I thought at first it was a rumor spread by the British newspapers.

The message of the novel seems to be that we’ll find love and adversity no matter which life we’ve chosen. So if we can’t change the past, it’s fun to imagine the possibilities in store for our future.