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Recent Reading: The Space Between Worlds
Earlier this week, with 22 minutes left on my Libby check-out, I finished The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson. This is an SFF book about Caramenta, a young woman who travels to different parallel universes to gather information on their development for her employer, the tech company Eldridge.
In Cara’s world, and many like it, environmental disasters have wreaked havoc on Earth. The population is divided among people who live in domed, climate-controlled cities, and those left to the wasteland. The trick about world-hopping is that you can’t go to a parallel universe where “you” are still alive—so suddenly wastelanders like Cara, who have died over and over again by virtue of their terrible living circumstances, become valuable to Eldridge. Cara is particularly special, because in 325 parallel Earths which Eldridge has reached, she is dead in all but eight of them.
There is a lot of playing with what becomes of people if their circumstances are changed—Cara is especially interested in tracking one parallel version of herself who was adopted into a city family at a young age and how radically different her life is from the other Caras as a result.
The Space Between Worlds is pretty light on the SFF, actually. The world-hopping is really secondary to the issues of race and class that the book focuses on. I enjoyed Cara as a protagonist; she’s self-serving in a way that makes perfect sense given how hard she’s had to fight just to survive, but not cold-hearted. There are moments when you can see how much she wants to be different, softer, kinder, but she doesn’t trust the world not to punch her in the solar plexus if she tries.
She has a struggling romance with Dell, a female coworker born and raised in the city, and it’s tragic watching how the aforementioned race and class issues throw up roadblocks between them. I thought Johnson was occasionally a bit heavy-handed on the subject of Cara’s yearning for Dell, but on the whole this aspect was fun to watch play out.
The book was engaging all the way through and I always wanted to see how things turned out, but I’m not totally sold on the later third or so of the plot. I can’t decide if the ending was anticlimactic or just realistic. I did like the book, but something about the final big plot point just didn’t fully land for me.
Overall, a fun read.
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*If* this is her first major bout of Love-Sickness,
And, she is Still young, then, as I recall it,
There is probably no way to be too heavy handed!
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