Pretty Little Mistakes - a gimmick that mostly works

I don't know if there's still around, but kids of my generation read a fair amount of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, where every couple pages you faced a decision and "chose" which path you wanted your protagonist to take. While there would be occasional overlap, generally your choices (obviously) influenced the course of the narrative, resulting in different endings.

The only one of these works that I remember at all was a time-travel one, set in Elizabethan/Shakespearean England. One of the endings involved being a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and watching her try to get some ring off as she died. (Why do I remember these things????)

All of this takes me to Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes, which is billed as "a do-over novel." It's a clever premise, beginning with a single decision: do you go to college with your boyfriend, or do you go travel? What major you choose, where you choose to travel, etc. sends you on entirely different paths. (Although crystal meth seems to figure in an awful lot of them.)

But therein lie the three problems I had with this book. 1 - I didn't know when I was finished. I still don't really. Each life takes about 10 minutes (probably less) to read, but I don't really want to try to ensure I hit all 150 of them. At this point, I feel pretty well over it. Maybe I'll try to find a couple more paths I missed. 2 - I didn't care about the characters. Because "you" are the protagonist (and this "you" wasn't much like me), she isn't defined, and the other characters pop in and out. It's not about plot or character development. And as a result, kind of boring. 3 - My first two complaints are kind of weak, b/c McElhatton's project wasn't meant to have a defined "I've read this" or rich characters. But the intellectual conceit of the gimmick is that the decisions you take send your life in wildly different directions. But really, one person wouldn't potentially make all the decisions in these pages. They require personalities that are just too different from one another. So it's hard for me to think of "you" as a single person.

Am I over-thinking this? Probably. It was fun to be a pharma rep and a lesbian in Ireland and to marry into the mafia and die of hepatitis in the London flat of an Indian transsexual. But do I feel enriched from having read Pretty Little Mistakes? Unfortunately, no.