Book Review: “Million Little Mistakes” by Heather McElhatton

Warning: If you haven’t read “Million Little Mistakes” by Heather McElhatton, don’t read this review if you don’t want too many spoilers!

I’m back with another book review, and this time it’s “Million Little Mistakes” by Heather McElhatton!

This is a different genre of book than what I usually read, because this one is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” type of book. I read these kinds of books growing up, and they usually had a fantasy or sci-fi setting to go with them and were geared for children, hence why I’ve never really reviewed one until now. This particular book is much different because of the following:

1. It’s clearly geared towards adults, not children. More on this a bit later in the review.
2. It takes place in a more real-life setting as opposed to fantasy and/or sci-fi.
3. Did I mention that it’s geared towards adults? There were sex scenes or mentions of sex where I just didn’t expect it at all (and some where it was to be expected, depending on the plotline that you got).

This is the first “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type of book I’ve read in years, so this was new for me to try reading. Because of the nature of how these types of books work, however, I’m going to be focusing on plotlines as opposed to characters in this review overall.

I couldn’t find a good summary of this book, so….basically, it’s about YOU, the protagonist, who just won twenty-two million dollars. What do you do with this money? That is basically what the whole overall plot is about. For those of us that fantasize about winning that much money in the lottery, this is probably something that’ll be fun to read, to pass the time.

In terms of individual plotlines, the choices you make can put you down many different paths, with really ridiculous, over-the-top, happy or tragic endings—and I think you’ll find at least one or two that you’ll find enjoyable, despite how ridiculous-sounding they are. There were a lot of times that I got the bad endings when I least expected them, and same went for the good endings.

As strange as some of the endings may be, however—such as, for instance, an ending where you decide to manufacture drugs and you end up getting super-rich and obtaining robot servants—they were actually quite interesting to read overall. Some paths to various endings play on the fears of greedy family members, spouses marrying you for your money rather than loving you or using the opportunity to rob you out of revenge for an affair you had, people trying to kill you to get your money, etc. Some of these paths are much more realistic than others, and some far more random than others (I wasn’t expecting for the protagonist to kill a love interest in one ending after turning down their offer of marriage, nor have an ending where you rob a whole restaurant), as I mentioned earlier.

In terms of the characters themselves, a lot of them are really flat. Given the nature of this book, it makes sense in a way as of why they would be—depending on which path you take, you can spend a lot of it with your boyfriend or take off with someone else after having an affair, be closer to family or not, etc. Because of the many paths, there is less opportunity for any of the characters to have a more stable place in your life (in the book that is, not in real life) and so having these multiple plotlines heavily contributes to the lack of character development in the end and so the characters are simply additions to the plot. Just because the characters are more of accessories to the plotlines and are generally doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily bad to read, however. A lot of them contribute to the random happenings of the endings you come across, disastrous or not, and that can be just as fun to read as well.

Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars! It’s definitely something fun to read to pass the time, and if you’re wondering what random, crazy things could happen if you won twenty-two million dollars, you might want to try this out.

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