Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. Characters and twists are introduced throughout, and you may not pick up why something happened until later in the book. During this time Patterson catches photos of his adventure that will, in time, make him revered (in this current life line).

It turns out that the tattoo is tremendously unique, and it will give him the ability to see his parallel lives. I think both of us will admit that this short story is not the greatest piece of writing that Carroll put pen to paper, but there was something about that story that inspired me to riff off it.In Walker’s case, those revelations involve — and this is the kind of thing you find all the time in Carroll’s universe — a very real and sinister Rumpelstiltskin and other figures from the darker Grimm fairy tales.

I don’t think it’s his best novel, but it is far from his worst — and if he were to die tomorrow, it would serve as a pretty good summation of his career. Also, and this is nitpicky, in the passages where Graham is meant to be a successful comedian, the jokes don’t land. Breakfast is a beautiful musing on moments of personal choice, the big ones, the ones that are rooted in our existential crisis between identities of who we say we want to be vs the rules by which we choose to live our lives. There are only a limited number of switches that a person can make, and when they at last decide which life they’d like to live, their tattoo will vanish and they will forget about the tattoo and the magic.As Patterson leapfrogs back and forth through time and among his various possible existences, he gradually comes to understand “how his behavior influences and shapes others’ lives even after he was long gone from them. For reasons he can’t entirely explain to himself, he’s struck by the artwork in the window of Anna Mae Collins’s Hardy Fuse tattoo parlor. Failing at his dream of being a stand-up comedian, he takes a last hurrah road trip before he gives up comedy forever. The road trip was meant to be one last hooray, but it proved to be much more when he stops off on a whim to have a tattoo.