A review by reubenalbatross
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Did not finish book. Stopped at 37%.

When I started reading this, I was ready to have a good time. The premise was interesting, and the first 80 or so pages were really intriguing. However, after the story settled, and I got past those first 80 pages, everything started to feel really flat. 

Apart from the main character, the characters were never fleshed out enough to feel real, so I couldn’t connect to them. This also made it doubly bad when we were introduced to a different version of the characters, as I was never quite sure where the differences lay apart from ‘good’ or ‘evil’. 

There are so many characters we’re meant to be terrified of, but as the reader we never see them do anything. We’re just told what they do second hand, so I never felt an impact when the mc was going through apparent emotional torture from their past actions. 

There’s also a huge amount of world building we are never given. In some books this would be fine, but as this one focusses so much on the mechanics of jumping, when essential information isn’t given to us it is so much more obvious. Like how could a full-on emergency bunker be made by the World Zero people on another Earth without anyone ever noticing?? Instead of being given the info we need, there's just pages and pages of detail about completely unnecessary things that don’t impact the story at all. 

The writing style is also very much all about telling, rather than showing. And the writing feels really disjointed in a lot of places – paragraphs, sentences, and sometimes even whole scenes don’t run on from each other, and it reads like chunks of the book were removed. I don’t believe this was the author’s intention, I think it’s just a badly edited book. 

Also, as I read on, the mc became more and more annoying. She makes almost exclusively awful decisions, and I couldn’t find any motivation to root for her. 

All in all, I don’t care enough to continue reading, and especially not enough to have to read my deadname every other page. 

Great premise, mediocre execution.