If you want to know more about All This & More and don’t mind some very early spoilers, keep on reading.

If you just want to know if it’s worth your valuable reading time, jump straight down to the last paragraph.

People of a certain age will remember the gamebook as a rapidly waning—if not lost—example of the odd genre that is interactive fiction. There was nothing quite like the promise of YOU being the hero of your own story, and while the concept has lived on in various forms such as visual novels and solo role playing, there’s a simple joy in holding a multitude of possibilities in your hands as a physical object that modern variants haven’t been able to replicate.

Peng Shepherd seems to be aware of this absence and is seeking to remedy it in her latest novel. All This & More is a Choose Your Own Adventure book for adults. It’s about life and roads not taken. It’s a mystery. It has multiple endings. Most importantly, whether you grew up with Choose Your Own Adventure books or not, you will most likely indulge in the time-honored tradition of leaving a finger as a bookmark as you flip to a different page to continue the story so you can dial it back and pick another path in case it doesn’t go the way that you would have liked.

All This & More also goes one step further than the gamebooks: it tells a story about choices and the consequences that follow. It’s a little bit meta that way.

The novel opens with the story of history’s most successful reality show, the eponymous All This & More. The show, unlike anything that came before it, has the ability to rewrite reality itself. The goal is for the show’s star to eventually construct their perfect, ideal life. At the center of it all is the Bubble, a work of scientifically magical quantum physics in which time and space can be molded on command. It is never made clear exactly what it looks like and how people interface with it, but the Bubble seems like the strange love child of Terrace House and Star Trek’s holodeck. The first season is a hit. The second season comes apart under mysterious circumstances during production, and is never broadcast.

Marsh, the story’s protagonist, is the star of the show’s third and current season. She is forty-five years old, divorced, and lives with the regret of having left law school to raise her daughter. She has played it safe all her life, and she has many questions about what could have been if she had made different decisions in her past. All This & More is going to give her that opportunity, and in an interesting but not-so-surprising twist (since I already spoiled it for you), the reader is also given the opportunity to make those choices for Marsh.

The book does a clever thing with the choices: there is a guided path that the reader can follow by simply starting at the beginning and reading through the novel from page to page. Some decisions, however, will prompt the reader to skip ahead to a different part of the book, where the story unfolds in a different way. The choices all collapse into a single point at key parts of the plot, so the branches eventually feel more like different paths to the same destination instead of a multitude of potential futures.

It’s thematic and interactive, though—a great way to experience the choices that Marsh herself is making as the season progresses. As Marsh becomes more and more accustomed to exploring realities that might have been, her decisions get wilder and wilder. The simplicity and practicality of her first few decisions (“Should I try to save my marriage?”) soon give way to the flights of fancy that anyone might entertain (“Can I make it as a badass nature photographer who drives a truck down the side of an erupting volcano in Iceland?”) when handed the power of unlimited retries.

A more important question also begs to be asked: how perfect is perfect, and when is it good enough? Does a timeline warrant a do-over because with all else being the way it should be, the view from Marsh’s fancy corner office isn’t the one she wanted? What hoops would a person be willing to jump through to achieve absolute perfection, and what would they do if the game itself got in their way?

As if all this was not enough, the book also dangles a mystery before the reader : what happened to the botched second season of the show which never aired? Why does the word “chrysalis” keep appearing in every timeline and life that Marsh visits? How can some characters seemingly remember bits and pieces of timelines that Marsh had essentially erased by going back in time and making a different choice?

These questions lurk behind the more tv-friendly drama of Marsh’s search for the perfect life, and infuses the story with a bit of thrill and danger. Ultimately though, when the season finale draws near and the pieces start coming together, All This & More unfolds as a familiar story about how we make choices, how we regret our choices, and what we make of the things that follow. It’s in its telling that it excels, and that alone makes the book worth reading.

The theme of choice persists in the book’s use of multiple endings, and this might be where it hits the hardest. While the outcomes might seem trite or predictable on the surface—this is lampshaded by the book itself in one of its concluding scenarios—the endings also deal with the existential crisis of having choices in life to begin with. Some of them bring Marsh’s story to a close in haunting and almost unsettling ways. It’s a sudden turn into weird science fiction territory, and I’m all for it.

All This & More can stand proudly as one of the better examples of modern interactive fiction. I would not recommend it for the mystery alone, but that part of it fits in comfortably with the rest to form a cohesive whole. The endings are very well done and follow their associated choices to their logical—if sometimes shocking—conclusions. The experience of reading the book is rewarding all on its own. Highly recommended.