The Space Between Worlds
Author: Micaiah Johnson
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication Date: August 2020
Cara is valuable because she’s good at dying - albeit on other worlds. The secrets to multiverse traveling have been unlocked by a genius scientist, and Cara has a job as a traverser, one of precious few people who walk on alternate Earths. Precious few because no one can visit an alternate world where their counterpart is still alive. And it turns out that Cara is dead almost everywhere else in the multiverse. Plucked from the dirt of the wastelands, Cara’s job gives her a conditional home in the filthy rich Wiley City, a place so apart from the wastelands that it is literally walled-off. She collects off-world data for Eldridge Institute and flirts shamelessly (and fruitlessly) with her coworker Dell. When one of Cara’s eight remaining alternate world doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, she is plunged into a web of old secrets on a new world. What she finds will link her past and present, putting her in the center of a plot threatening the entire multiverse.
Firstly, I need to encourage you to stick with this book. It starts with introductions to an overwhelming number of undeveloped characters. Cara is rapidly established as the center of the plot, but the events and places connected to her are revealed similarly to the characters - too many at once. The plot develops and coalesces into a coherent story as tension rises between Cara’s wasteland home and new Wiley City residence. Cara is the Katniss Everdeen of a different dystopian future. She is fiercely determined to survive, but still bound by an ultimate sense of right and wrong. Walking in the space between worlds has made her a part of every place she goes, yet unable to ever completely belong in any of them.
Johnson writes in a manner that fits the personality of her main character, convincingly building her settings through a lens colored by Cara’s sense of herself and her situation. As such, she is able to subtly convey social and personal observations in a way that does not feel heavy handed. The Space Between Worlds uses a unique and highly compelling main character to expose and build on conflict, and therefore plot. This plot is revealed piecemeal, but is ultimately worth the wait. YA dystopian science fiction and fantasy readers should enjoy Johnson’s complex, engaging protagonist and the worldview gradually constructed from Cara’s perspective.
D. K. Nuray, age 14
