Hello Fellow Challenge Readers!

It’s the final month of the 2024 Online Reading Challenge! How did your reading go this month? Did you read something that was dual timelines that you enjoyed? Share in the comments!

I read our main title: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. Without meaning to, I also read a couple other dual timeline books, but The Great Believers was the best of those recent reads.

Splitting between 1985 Chicago and 2015 Paris, Rebecca Makkai weaves these two timelines into a cohesive story that pulls at the lives of many individuals across time and space. Yale Tishman is working as the developmental director for an art gallery in 1985 Chicago. He is working hard to bring a collection of 1920s paintings in as a gift to the gallery, but egos both inside the gallery and outside the gallery are affecting his ability to secure this gift. As Yale’s professional life takes off, his personal life is fracturing. The AIDS epidemic is destroying the lives of people around him. His friends are dying one by one, and after the funeral of his friend Nico, the virus starts to come closer to Yale than ever before. Yale turns to Nico’s little sister, Fiona, for help, guidance, and solidarity.

Flash forward to 2015 and Fiona is a wreck. She lost contact with her daughter Claire years ago, but a friend recently sent her a video of who she thinks is Claire on a bridge in Pairs. Determined to rescue Claire from the cult she disappeared into, Fiona heads to Paris. Once arrived, she stays with an old friend who documented the Chicago AIDS crisis, forcing Fiona to reckon with the feelings, emotions, and actions that the crisis thrust onto her life all those years ago. Her time spent in Paris is time spent examining her past and all the ways AIDS changed her life and her relationship with those around her, specifically her daughter.

Makkai expertly weaves Yale’s life from 1985 with Fiona in 2015, diving back and forth between the two, teasing just enough information from one to help inform the other and vice versa. What set this book apart for me was the narrator and his ability to pull me into the story from the start. While the timelines were inextricably linked together, the author still gave equal importance to both places in time, while also acknowledging how the past impacts the present both directly and indirectly.

In January, we’ll be starting the 2025 Online Reading Challenge with a brand new theme! I can’t wait to share this with you.