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"A multiverse-hopping outsider discovers a secret that threatens her home world and her fragile place in it-a stunning sci-fi debut that's both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. CARA IS DEAD ON THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR WORLDS. The multiverse business is booming, but there's just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying-from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn't outrun. But on this earth, Cara's survived. And she's reaping the benefits, thanks to the well-heeled Wiley City scientists who ID'd her as an outlier and plucked her from the dirt. Now she's got a new job collecting offworld data, a path to citizenship, and a near-perfect Wiley City accent. Now she can pretend she's always lived in the city she grew up staring at from the outside, even if she feels like a fraud on either side of its walls. But when one of her eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined-and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse"--… (more)
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The book follows Cara, a woman who can travel between parallel universes. She's an outsider in every world she visits, because her parallel selves are all dead. But she also has a
Here are some specific things I liked about the book:
- The characters are well-developed and relatable. Cara is a complex and interesting protagonist, and I really enjoyed following her journey.
- The plot is fast-paced and suspenseful. There were a few twists and turns that I didn't see coming.
- The themes of identity, privilege, and belonging are handled sensitively and thoughtfully.
- The book is full of beautiful imagery. Johnson does a great job of describing the different worlds that Cara visits.
Overall, I really enjoyed The Space Between Worlds. It's a well-written, thought-provoking, and exciting book that I would definitely recommend to others.
[Disclaimer: I am not very good at writing reviews so I asked Bard, the Google AI, for help]
Eminently readable and absolutely addictive. If I could give it more than 5 stars, I would.
Recommended for anyone who likes the possibilities of a multiverse in their narratives, including complex relationships and social commentary.
I would recommend that if you read this book, that you keep a cast of characters on each world to keep track of who's who. Many of the doppelgangers existed on alternative earths but have different names. I find myself confused until I kept such a roster. This novel had its moments, especially her relationship with her handler, Dell, but these were few and sparse. I found myself slogging laboriously through much of this book, resulting in me putting it down from time to time and picking up another book.
That aside, this book was twisty and turny and all sorts of unique, messed up, hard-hitting exposition. It had an expertly crafted, slowly teased out, unfiltered, unapologetic character reveal. Each dribbled fact we were given felt like a dirty secret earned and even though some were freely given in the beginning and some were easily sussed out, they weren't any less delicious.... the rest felt hard won and masterfully doled out... little breadcrumbs leading us to the character's truist self. We learn as she does about her background, morals, self-checks, stopgaps and core values. We learn what she is/has been/will be willing to do to keep "safe", what she was willing to overlook in that pursuit, who/what she will allow herself to ultimately become and it is exciting AND, in the end, extremely rewarding.
The writing was solid... the world(s) development far exceeded that and THAT'S saying something. I stayed up into the wee-ist of hours craving... absolutely fiending to know what happened next and I regret nothing. I might not have known where the story was going but it turns out that I was in good hands the whole way... what a ride... what a great example of how streamlined and unencumbered Scifi can be and ohhhhhh what a satisfying ending can look like!
Overall:
This book shows much love and for the LGBTQ community and showcased an extremely complex, well developed POC MC... I loved the inclusivity all around.
"It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable ."
That about sums up my feelings for this book. I highly, 100%, both hands in the air, reccomend this read!
~ Enjoy
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the ARC.
First - I really liked Cara in this story. She is an incredibly interesting character. The characters surrounding her also well written, from
Unfortunately, the author sacrificed world building for the greater story. For example, it doesn't make a lot sense that guns are outlawed, to the point where nobody even knows how to make them. Or that one man is given control of the whole project. There were a few other problems with the story that I found myself rolling my eyes.
This complication puts an unexpected premium on people near the bottom of the social scale, whose life expectancy makes it likely that their analogues have already died. Among those hired to work as a “traverser” is Cara, a young woman from the badlands outside of the gleaming metropolis of Wiley City. Traversing offers Cara an unexpected opportunity to trade the poverty she knew for a life of prosperity and security. In taking it, though, she finds herself navigating between a different set of worlds that define her existence. And at the heart of all this lies a secret that Cara holds dear, one that makes her feel like an outsider regardless of whichever world she happens to occupy.
These layers of meaning speak to the quality of Johnson’s novel. From it she spins a tale of love, ambition, and power that propels the reader effortlessly throughout the book. Often her story takes surprising turns, yet none of them feel implausible or contrived as they are revealed. Much of the emotional power in it comes from the relevance of her imagined world to the one in which we live, the space between which is probably the smallest of all the ones depicted. It all makes for a great read that, like all good science fiction, uses imagined worlds to provide insight into our own.
Cara is one of those outliers, plucked
Everything is going smoothly, and Cara has a nice apartment and a good income, and makes regular visits to her family in the wasteland settlement of Ashtown. Then another of Cara's parallel selves dies. Cara has a new world to visit, and events start to threaten Cara's dangerous secret.
It also leads to Cara discovering the dangerous secret of the seemingly kindly scientist and Elbridge CEO who invented the world-crossing technology.
I started reading this book with some real skepticism, as it superficially seemed like yet another dystopia, a part of the sff genre that I really do not love. It does take place on a blighted Earth, where developed, technologically advanced civilization exists only in walled cities. There's trade between the cities and their outlying slums in the wasteland, including a sort of edgy tourism by the well-off city people to the safer parts of the slums arts and crafts can be purchased.
We only see Wiley City and its Ashtown slum, but there are other cities and other slums, and other inhabited, if struggling, areas. One of these people is one of Cara's mentors, Jean Sanogo, from the Ivory Coast, survivor of a time as a child soldier before he was found and identified someone who had enough parallel selves dead that he was a good candidate for one of the first traversers. This is a climatologically blighted world, with more damage done by wars caused by the climate change, but the wars now seem to be over, and it's all about living as well as possible in the blight.
One way of doing that is to import raw materials from parallel worlds, similar enough that the world-crossing technology can reach them, but with enough accessible resources to be worth stealing.
The plot-based conflicts are interesting, if sometimes thin. The characters become interesting and compelling, both in meeting alternate versions of some, and in the development the versions we get to know best experience. Jean and his family are more than just a warm, family group with a love of good cooking, though that's an important part of them. Cara learns, develops, changes, makes major choices along the way from a young woman who just wants to remain gainfully employed long enough to earn citizenship in Wiley City, to a woman who wants to make the world better, and is willing to make real sacrifices for her family. Other characters also reveal themselves in interesting ways. Overall, far more satisfying and enjoyable than I originally anticipated.
Recommended.
I received this book from NetGalley via the 2021 Hugo Voters Packet, and am reviewing it voluntarily.
Filed under: Books that make me cry.
It's really good. I'm glad I bought it. I hope this recommendation spurs someone else on to read it, too.
I like to care about the characters in a story, I like to root for them to survive the story; granted that in the 380 known realities in this story Cara is only alive in 8 of them, her survival in the core reality of the story didn't matter to me. I
I read this because it was nominated for the Hugos and I can see why, it's well written and I'm sure there are people who would love it but I'm not one and my favourite novel of all that I have read still stands.
A multiverse story could easily become unwieldy, but Johnson uses some clever worldbuilding tricks to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s only possible to travel to 380 worlds that resonate with ‘Earth Zero’, the world where Cara lives. This means the worlds Cara travels to aren’t vastly different. The worlds where society is more equal are somewhere out of reach, as are the worlds where gun violence is prevalent. The same cast of characters fulfil different roles within much the same society, and this is resolutely a character-focused rather than a technology-focused story. If you want to know exactly how world walking works you’ll be out of luck. (I never understand why people want to know how things like this work in books, because of course it *doesn’t* work in reality, so any possible explanation would be made-up gobbledygook?)
So, if that doesn’t put you off, stay for the warmth of the mentorship between two world-weary people (Cara/Jean), stay for the understated but life-sustaining connection between two women (Cara/Dell), stay for the complexities of interacting with someone who in another life was your abuser — stay for a story about life.
Main character, Cara, has the job in her world (the one with the proper technology) of traveling to other parallel universes to perform a variety of tasks. Everyone, including Cara, can only travel to universes
There is intrigue, class struggle, religious zealots, despots in the various universes.
Like with the multiverse, things can get a bit confusing, especially when the various worlds are referred to by just a number.
I felt that this is a great standalone, but more time in this world would be welcome!
" the first time he used those teeth on me was early in our relationship, our first fight. He'd cut my neck from behind, more a slice with his tooth than a bite. It was a small cut, not even into the
I waited for the telling spray, the taste they say is bitter and signals that you'll never stop bleeding and you'll never feel again. He left his hand there until my jaw cramped, until the waiting was worse than the ending and I thought about probing the ring for a trigger with my tongue myself, just to have control. Then he pulled his hand away.
'Learn your lesson,' he said before walking away."
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Signed by the author, limited to 500 copies, black sprayed page edges.