Review: The Space Between Worlds

The Space Between Worlds
 by Micaiah Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Even worthless things can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand lesson of my life."

In The Space Between Worlds, interdimensional travel has just been discovered and scientists are eager to get out there to study the multiverse. There is, however, one big obstacle that impedes most of them from traveling to the parallel universes: if you are currently alive in another parallel world, you cannot travel there without dying. Two of the same person cannot exist on the same world, and for most of the scientists who grew up in a cushy lifestyle, it is much more likely that they are still alive in the nearly four hundred discovered dimensions. So, to study these worlds, they turn to people like Cara, who grew up in the slums across the border of the city. Her life circumstances are so dismal that she is only alive on eight of the worlds, allowing her to collect data from the rest of them.

Cara wants to excel at her job as a traverser so that she can continue to live in the city, instead of returning to the slums where she has to struggle to get by. She tries to play by the rules so that she can move up, and also so that no one discovers her secret: she isn't who everyone thinks she is. And when she is sent to a new world where she recently died, she faces a whole new ethical challenge that completely changes her life.

I really liked how this book was written, there is a lot of introspection that I really enjoyed reading as the main character developed. I think that the concept of the story is pretty unique and I thought it was interesting to read from the perspective of an underprivileged woman trying to make it in a privileged city. It was easy to read and I got through it pretty quickly. The only thing that really bothered me was that I felt that the sci-fi elements were a little underdeveloped. From my understanding of parallel worlds, any small change in one world can have significant changes in the future. The other worlds in this story are way too similar if they have always existed together. The way that they are set up, they only make sense if all of the other worlds were somehow created when the main character was born. Even so, I really enjoyed it!

Mature content: profanity, sexual innuendo, graphic violence, death, domestic abuse.

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