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sophia_sol) wrote2021-07-11 11:01 am
sophia_sol) wrote2021-07-11 11:01 am
The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Oh boy. Hmm. Where to start? A brilliant book, but I have some complicated feelings about it, so let's see if I can work through those by writing about it!
In this book, Cara is a traverser, someone who travels between different versions of the world for her job. The reason she can do this: she's dead in most other versions of reality, and you can only go to worlds where you don't already exist. So most traversers come from difficult backgrounds, the kind of lives where you have a lot of near misses with death. Between her history and her job, she has something of a complicated relationship with her own identity, and with the concept of death! She also has a complicated relationship with her handler, Dell, involving flirtation from Cara and a certain degree of mutual attraction, and Dell keeping firm boundaries that make it clear she'll never be willing to respond or act on this attraction.
It's a book with a lot to say about what makes a person who they are, about class dynamics and the huge effects they have on everyone's lives, about what it means to love someone (both platonic and romantic), and about evil capitalist tech bro billionaires.
All of this is GREAT. But I found the book very slow to start; it took quite a while before I was into it. And even after I got interested, it took even longer for me to be really invested. I think this might be because the book is doing enough unexpected things that it took a long time for me to be able to settle into an understanding of what sort of book I was actually reading! Not to say that unexpectedness is bad; just that when I don't know what to expect, I can't emotionally prepare, and so I hold myself at a further emotional reserve from the story.
Anyway eventually I was invested indeed, and cared a lot about everything, and also found it all really interesting! But then I was once again thrown by the ending.
Honestly I was expecting this book to have a much more bittersweet ending than it actually did, but the book ends with Cara alive, with a good job, having accomplished her objectives and being in a successful long-term relationship with the woman she loves. And I'm not complaining about that! But it does feel like it....happens too easily, maybe? Or too much off-screen, or too fast? Idk but I was still thinking that things were going to have to involve much more sacrifice when all of a sudden the book was wrapping things up in a bow on the happy ending.
Maybe it's that Cara spends so much of her life believing she doesn't deserve good things, and that she's a danger to the people she cares about, and I don't feel like I saw enough of Cara unlearning that mentality before we're told that everything works out basically fine for her. I think having all the same things happening in the ending would have worked for me better if they had been presented to the reader with more uncertainty from Cara/the narrative that these good things might actually be around to stay.
At any rate, despite the issues I had, I do really think it's an amazing book and I'm so glad I read it. I will be thinking about it for a while, I think!
Content note: Cara is a survivor of an abusive intimate partner relationship, and although that relationship is in her past, it's relevant to her present and so you hear a lot about it.
In this book, Cara is a traverser, someone who travels between different versions of the world for her job. The reason she can do this: she's dead in most other versions of reality, and you can only go to worlds where you don't already exist. So most traversers come from difficult backgrounds, the kind of lives where you have a lot of near misses with death. Between her history and her job, she has something of a complicated relationship with her own identity, and with the concept of death! She also has a complicated relationship with her handler, Dell, involving flirtation from Cara and a certain degree of mutual attraction, and Dell keeping firm boundaries that make it clear she'll never be willing to respond or act on this attraction.
It's a book with a lot to say about what makes a person who they are, about class dynamics and the huge effects they have on everyone's lives, about what it means to love someone (both platonic and romantic), and about evil capitalist tech bro billionaires.
All of this is GREAT. But I found the book very slow to start; it took quite a while before I was into it. And even after I got interested, it took even longer for me to be really invested. I think this might be because the book is doing enough unexpected things that it took a long time for me to be able to settle into an understanding of what sort of book I was actually reading! Not to say that unexpectedness is bad; just that when I don't know what to expect, I can't emotionally prepare, and so I hold myself at a further emotional reserve from the story.
Anyway eventually I was invested indeed, and cared a lot about everything, and also found it all really interesting! But then I was once again thrown by the ending.
Honestly I was expecting this book to have a much more bittersweet ending than it actually did, but the book ends with Cara alive, with a good job, having accomplished her objectives and being in a successful long-term relationship with the woman she loves. And I'm not complaining about that! But it does feel like it....happens too easily, maybe? Or too much off-screen, or too fast? Idk but I was still thinking that things were going to have to involve much more sacrifice when all of a sudden the book was wrapping things up in a bow on the happy ending.
Maybe it's that Cara spends so much of her life believing she doesn't deserve good things, and that she's a danger to the people she cares about, and I don't feel like I saw enough of Cara unlearning that mentality before we're told that everything works out basically fine for her. I think having all the same things happening in the ending would have worked for me better if they had been presented to the reader with more uncertainty from Cara/the narrative that these good things might actually be around to stay.
At any rate, despite the issues I had, I do really think it's an amazing book and I'm so glad I read it. I will be thinking about it for a while, I think!
Content note: Cara is a survivor of an abusive intimate partner relationship, and although that relationship is in her past, it's relevant to her present and so you hear a lot about it.
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