Fun enough but nothing special
3 stars
Content warning Spoilers if you don't already know the basic premise of the book. If you know the gist, as I'm sure everyone does, then it's basically spoiler free.
It's an interesting little book.
Of course everyone knows the basic premise, but still it was fun to read the way it was told. The way we hopped across a few different viewpoints at different times, and had different narrators, through the use of letters that the characters send each other, was quite clever and interesting.
But I do think Stevenson could have done a lot more interesting things with this premise. The idea that you can take a drug and a different half of your personality can come out, one that you've been longing to let out of the cage all along, is fascinating and I think there's scope there to explore how his potion is any different from a person with an addiction who doesn't feel like they're themselves until they drink, smoke, take drugs etc. There were feint allusions to this, it's in the text, but really I would've liked more around the questions of how much were responsible for our own actions when under the influence, how much we have to surrender to our instincts vs fight them, and how much or little we have to accept ourselves vs working to change and grow
People say this book is an essay on the duality of human nature but honestly, it isn't really. It could have been! If it were 100 pages longer perhaps...