TiMER

I read about a book coming out this fall (sorry, don't remember the title) in the Hunger Games genre about a society in which everyone is matched by a computer for their optimum compatibility. In TiMER, we get a variation on that theme, and a well done variation at that. A company has figured out how to read your biochemistry to determine who your perfect true love will be, as well as to identify how much time will pass before you meet that person. Very SciFi and we don't get the details of how this would work (even as I write it, too many "practical" questions come to mind). Regardless, this is a story that centers around how we live our lives and make the decisions about relationships that we do. What would you do if you knew that you would not meet your true love for another 10 years? What would you do if you knew it was tomorrow? How would you live your life if your TiMER was blank, meaning that your true love did not have a TiMER installed. You could have already met them. So we get a serious and lighthearted (it has to be lighthearted lest it travel toward depressing) look at the difficult decisions made around relationship. And like a true modern romantic comedy, it wraps up nicely. I would have preferred a bit more of a SciFi ending, where you are left wondering about the possibilities, which would have been easy to do. But I am sure it would have been largely unsatisfying for most viewers.
4 stars (out of 5)