Overall though, I found the worldbuilding to be highly intriguing and I enjoyed finding out each little new nugget of information when it was revealed to me. I loved Micaiah Johnson's writing. There's just something about it that's so poetic and yet grounded in the harsh reality that her story takes place in that makes me *scream* with amazement. Here are some of my favourite quotes from the story:

I genuinely loved the world building, the characters and the writing and if this was the start of a trilogy I would have been ecstatic. But instead, the book developed (tried to at least) so many plot points which were then left out of the main story and therefore I was left without a sense of finality. The Space Between Worlds] remained two steps ahead of my imagination, rattling it out of complacency and flooding it with color and heat. . . . Profoundly satisfying.” —The New York Times Book Review(Editors’ Choice) Micaiah Johnson’s debut is a punk album, presenting a world where even our possibilities are colonized. I loved every twisting minute of it.” —Alex White, author of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

Need Help?

When the multiverse was confirmed, the spiritual and scientific communities both counted it as evidence of their validity. Yes, supposedly they all confess like that AND they use fireworks to cover it up but has anyone ever heard fireworks? Let's just highlight that it's really challenging to get a firework blast cover whole phrases reliably. Several syllables - likely but confessing, this, Caralee, are you out of your anyworldly mind? The Space Between Worlds centers on Cara, a young woman who works as a 'traverser', someone who is able to travel to an Earth in a parallel universe. Travel is only possible if the traveler is already dead on the destination Earth. Due to growing up in a dystopian wasteland, most versions of Cara are already dead, making her uniquely able to traverse to numerous worlds. [1] Cara refers to poor and disadvantaged people like herself as "trash people". [2] Adam Bosch, the founder of the Eldridge Institute had discovered a way to see into other universes, a way to retrieve intel from worlds with a slight frequency shift from that of Earth Zero. To collect this important data, "disposable people" were needed as traversers who were pulled from one world and forced into another for the purpose of data collection. Out of 380 compatible worlds, Cara was still alive on 8. She could only be sent to worlds where her doppelganger had died. "With the exception of some of the traversers, we are stunningly expendable". To survive means to strive for permanent citizenship in Wiley City. Having traversed more than any other Eldridge employee, she was well on her way to this goal. Even though the main plot was a science fiction/dystopian thriller, the book also dealt with philosophical questions in a subtle way; how the smallest choices can make the biggest differences and how different situations shape us into different people.

Ahsoka did not travel forward through time after entering the World Between Worlds, she just went outside of time briefly. (At least, she didn’t move through time during this trip.) I feel as though in the end, Cara's world and our world aren't that much different. In her own words, "it's not a different world. It's still our world, just with different paths taken".

Like purrgil, Loth-wolves have an intimate connection to the Force. But where those magical space whales can travel at hyper speeds, Loth-wolves can travel through the World Between Worlds. Cara has a secret. She’s not this world’s Cara at all, with a stepbrother and a stepsister in Ashtown’s religious community: she’s another world’s Cara, escaping an abusive relationship with the ruler of Ashtown and the wasteland, determined to thrive – taking the place of a Cara who died traversing to her world. Cara’s existence, and her identity, is precarious in every sense of the word. This story showed me that survival isn't only just about surviving, it's also about what comes after. How you cope with that pain and how you grow from it. And it's not just the worldbuilding, but the writing as a whole. It feels fragmented and random. Sentences, paragraphs, and scenes don't logically follow from previous ones. Even dialogues don't really make sense. It's as if the author had written monologues for each speaker, then just interweaved their lines together and called it a conversation. Another point of contention is Dell and the relationship she had with Cara, which “developed” mostly in the last part of the book. Again, there was nothing natural and interesting to read about there. It all came about in a very forced manner to wrap things up and I never felt like I got the sense of who Dell was as a person, separate from Cara’s characterisation of her.