ALL THIS & MORE was an interesting exploration of the "what would you do if you could change your life" premise that Shepherd set out to write! I'll admit the first half kind of dragged and could have been trimmed down a bit more -- the mystery with Chyrsalis etc. was super interesting, but it took a while for this to really start becoming important (halfway through the book...).

I also think the choose-your-own-adventure wasn't really executed well in two ways. One is that there aren't actually that many choices (not like the OG choose-y0ur-own-adventure books where sometimes you only get four lines in and you die), and the choices that are there aren't actually that important to the story. Whether you go one way or the other, it all still converges to the same general plot. But the other issue is that the little choice you do get (the one very important choice at the end) takes you to three different endings, but none of the endings really hit very well because it doesn't have the plot and story to back it up. I feel like the three different endings are philosophically quite different, and even though Shepherd worked hard to make Marsh malleable for a story like this, some of the endings don't mesh well with what you see of Marsh.

Unfortunately, I don't really see any way to have made it satisfying and consistent for the reader without severely stripping a lot of Marsh's character away, to really make Marsh you, the reader, who is experiencing this story yourself. I think fundamentally it would have been fine without the choose-your-own adventure aspect, and this honestly ended up detracting from the punchiness of the story. 

Nonetheless, I still generally enjoyed, especially with regards to the aforementioned mystery elements! I'd be interesting in reading other things from Shepherd, especially maybe something a little more fast-paced. 

I'll admit it was kind of confusing in audiobook format...(on Libro.fm at least) the chapter titles don't quite match to what the narrator describes them to be called so it's hard to choose your own adventure if you can't figure out where to go, and a lot of the second choices were moved to the almost-end-but-not quite which made the ending confusing as someone who was just listening to it straight through. (There's 3 decisions at the end, but in between the place where you make the 3 decisions and the actual decision chapters, there's all the alternate choice progressions, but I didn't realize that I could have skipped those because I couldn't figure out where the actual three endings were because they weren't titled correctly). 

If you really like the idea of the premise, I'd recommend picking it up (in a text format), but I wouldn't recommend trying ALL THIS & MORE for just the choose-your-own-adventure format, as I feel it will disappoint. 

Thanks to Libro.fm for the complimentary copy! I listened on 2x speed. Despite the confusing format, I really enjoyed Helen Laser's narration -- the voices were great!