The end papers, one in gold and the other in green, contain mutiple circles of lists of alphabetical words. Each circle varies in fonts and shape. The book cover is a richly colored photographic landscape of objects such as yellow roses, butterflies, insects, a white mouse, and plant material. The Sackners were present at the author's reading at Books & Books in Coral Gables , Florida on 9/27/06. In this book, Danielewski deals with irrelevance of time in a fashion similar to Patchen's "Journal of Albion Moonlight." From Publishers Weekly: "A pastiche of Joyce and Beckett, with heapings of Derrida's Glas and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 thrown in for good measure, Danielewski's follow-up to House of Leaves is a similarly dizzying tour of the modernist and postmodernist heights"”and a similarly impressive tour de force. It comprises two monologues, one by Sam and one by Hailey, both "Allmighty sixteen and freeeeee," each narrating the same road trip, or set of neo-globo-revolutionary events"”or a revolution's end: "Everyone loves the Dream but I kill it." Figuring out what's happening is a big part of reading the book. The verse-riffs narrations, endlessly alliterative and punning (like Joyce) and playfully, bleakly existential (like Beckett), begin at opposite ends of the book, upside down from one another, with each page divided and shared. Each gets 180 words per page, but in type that gets smaller as they get closer to their ends (Glas was more haphazard), so they each gets exactly half a page only at the midway point of the book: page 180"”or half of a revolution of 360 degrees. A time line of world events, from November 22, 1863 ("the abolition of slavery"), to January 19, 2063 (blank, like everything from January 18, 2006, on), runs down the side of every page. The page numbers, when riffled flip-book style, revolve. The book's design is a marvel, and as a feat of Pynchonesque puzzlebookdom, it's magnificent. The book's difficulty, though, carries a self-consciousness that Joyce & Co. decidedly lack, and the jury will be out on whether the tricks are of the for-art's-sake variety or more like a terrific video game." KIRKUS REVIEWS: "The daunting maze explored in Danielewski's Borgesian first novel, House of Leaves (2000), only hinted at the depths to be plumbed in its intimidatingly innovative successor. It's a love story, road novel and paean to untrammeled freedom, presented in dual free-verse narratives spoken by Sam and Hailey, two 16-year-old vagabonds who embark on a mythic and allegorical journey across America, in a succession of variously acquired automobiles, during an expanding time period that stretches from the American Civil War to the immediate present. Rebels and malcontents, they repeatedly indulge in Whitmanesque, Rabelaisian arias ("I'm The World which / The Mountain descends from and / I laugh because it tickles"), while proclaiming their allegiance to nothing but each other ("Liberty and Love are one"), and eluding or battling characters emblematic of entrenched interests, convention and complacency (e.g., "Mad Robber Barons," "Hoovercrats"). The publisher helpfully suggests reading eight pages of Sam's story, then flipping the volume upside-down and reversing it, for eight pages in Hailey's voice, until the two narratives meet in the middle of the book. Further complications arise from chronological enumerations of historical events on each page's margins and versified comments on every page presented, upside-down, at the bottom of said page. Self-indulgence? Surely. But there's a real story here, and a persuasive sense that the couple's wild ride is a kind of creation myth that mirrors, as it presumes to explain, America's unruly energies --- as Sam and Hailey experience Hailey's brief dalliance with a macho avatar of military, militant power ("The Creep"), an Ongoing Party in New Orleans, a farcical hospital stay following an apparent overdose and an escape to the heartland and a climactic encounter with 'the peril pursuing US.' They're Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, an X-rated Archie and Veronica and perhaps All in the Family's embattled liberal couple Mike and Gloria. You have to work at it, but it's a trip well worth taking." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.