Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - The Space Between Worlds

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

92 reviews

thenextbookdilemma's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Where do I even start with this book?

First it stretches your mind, as I think is always the case when parallel universes are explored. This idea challenges our very existences and always throws me for a loop

I, like many of you (probably…maybe?) have considered on multiple occasions the question of, how might my life have been different if X had gone differently, or if I hadn’t met Y, or if Z had happened ? Well, Cara knows the answer to that question in 372 different worlds.

A very brief summary: This book is about multiverse travel. A woman has died on 372 different parallel universes and thus is able to visit them and gather data for her home earth. But soon she discovers that she is involved in something far more nefarious than expected.

I LOVED this book. The characters and all their iterations were so interesting and human. The worlds were well-developed and captivating. There were multiple plot twists and a romance subplot that I adored. The writing was beautiful and impressive especially for a debut!

But this book also makes you think about who you are, and who you could have been.

Would I be the same person if my circumstances had been different? Johnson says no, and I agree. We are not our circumstances, but we are not unaffected by them. Who might you become if your means of survival are not provided to you? How can we judge somebody who has to fight to survive, who lacks the same amount of security as we do? Who doesn’t know where their next meal or a roof over their head is coming from? It’s a reminder that the family you are born into, the class, the race, the place, is all just luck. And that very truth can be humbling or infuriating or devastating. I loved the way Johnson wove these questions of equity and classism into a gorgeous multiverse novel and I will long think about all the Emmas I could have been or perhaps, all the different Emmas I am parallel to this one.

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schnaucl's review against another edition

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adventurous dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting it to be set on contemporary earth or maybe the near future. That was probably my fault for making an assumption and this misalignment of expectations may have influenced how I felt about the book.

The idea that travel is limited to a few hundred worlds because otherwise they're too dissimilar to the traveler's world (and that they can start closely aligned enough for travel but become misaligned enough to make it impossible) is interesting. And it doesn't seem tied to the particular traveler, the present circumstances of the Earth as a whole has to be pretty similar. Consequently, most people's circumstances are pretty similar from world to world. It's certainly different from most alternate reality books where someone tries on various lives completely different from their own (only to realize the life they'd been living was the best one all along). It does mean that big historical moments and conditions have to be somewhat similar. For example, just as a world with nuclear war would take itself out of alignment, so would one with much greater equality, where some of the biggest problems have been solved.

There's also some romance to it, the notion that the same people come together across multiple worlds. Of course, those relationships aren't always healthy sometimes they're quite toxic.

But mostly, of course, it's about exploiting other worlds. Obtaining resources the prime world can't (or won't) extract on its own. And letting things play out on other worlds so they can decide what to do (or not) on their own. It's not quite clear how the data the travelers retrieve is gathered, but I suppose that's a minor detail.

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roxanned's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I had a good time reading this book.
The concept of the different worlds and that some realities are closer to Earth Zero's reality and some are very different from it is a concept I like a lot. To learn about different realities and what could have been is very interesting in my opinion. The world building in this book is not as pronounced as I would have hoped though. So there are some things I don't fully understand or wish I had more info on

(e.g. what exactly are runners? how does a world go dark? do new worlds come up? The whole downloading data from other worlds to use it)

. Nevertheless the story is interesting and I enjoyed it.
Another thing I like is that in every world some characteristics are more ingrained than others. And when taking the alternate selves of a character into account, every character is not entirely good or bad.

This is mainly a sci-fi with a dash of sapphic romance.

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katequiet's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Why didn't I read this sooner???

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amandadevoursbooks's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Y'all, I can't with this book. It was so freaking good.

We follow Kara who's one skill in her current life is that she is dead on over 160 parallel worlds. This means that she can travel to the other worlds and gather data.

The story twists and turns and is filled with Sapphic longing. It's a story about the endless possibilities of who we are as people, the endless number of ways we can harm each other, and the endless numbers of ways we can heal each other.

I loved it. I'm going to reread it. And I just can't believe how good this book was.

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