what time is Good Morning America is not the question Chloe Benjamin’s Under Story answers. reviewed the book as her third novel and followed Laurel and Eli as they search for their son Silas through a portal under the ice of Antarctica.
The review describes the novel as a 500-page melodrama of parental devotion and quantum hokum. Laurel is a mycologist, Eli is a physicist, and their grief drives them into the duoverse, a mirror universe where time runs backwards.
Under Story and the duoverse
The setup gives the book a clear speculative frame: a hidden passage beneath Antarctica, a reversed-time world, and a couple trying to reach a lost child. In the duoverse, September follows October and Obama follows Trump, a reversal that makes the premise feel less like ordinary fantasy than an engine for rearranging cause and effect.
The review also places Under Story alongside earlier reversal narratives. Ian McEwan published The Cockroach in 2019, and Martin Amis published Time’s Arrow in 1991, two titles that help situate Benjamin’s novel in a small line of backward-time fiction rather than in broad realist family drama.
Laurel, Eli and Silas
Laurel and Eli are not just abstract symbols of grief. She is a mycologist; he is a physicist; together they are trying to find a way back to Silas. That gives the novel a practical emotional center: the science-fiction mechanism is not there by itself, but as the route the parents choose when ordinary loss has already failed them.
The review says the book’s climate in the duoverse is unravaging and that extinct species pop up from the ground. Those details push the world beyond a simple mirror image and into something more unstable, where the setting itself behaves like a reversal of familiar life. For readers, that means the novel is operating on two levels at once: family grief and speculative world-building.
Quantum hokum in Under Story
The same review that praises the imagination also calls the narrative machinery shonky and distracting. That split matters for anyone deciding whether the book’s concept is the point or the problem: Benjamin is using a large speculative apparatus, but the review suggests the machinery can pull attention away from Laurel and Eli’s search.
Whether Laurel and Eli actually succeed in bringing Silas back is not answered in the source. What the review does make clear is that Under Story is being judged as a major third novel with a bold premise, one that asks readers to follow grief into a world where even time moves the other way.
