The Space Between Worlds
A multiverse-hopping outsider discovers a secret that threatens her home world and her fragile place in it–a stunning sci-fi debut that’s both a cross-dimensional adventure and a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging.
CARA IS DEAD ON THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR WORLDS.
The multiverse business is booming, but there’s just one catch: no one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive.
Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying–from diseases, from turf wars, from vendettas they couldn’t outrun.
But on this earth, Cara’s survived. And she’s reaping the benefits, thanks to the well-heeled Wiley City scientists who ID’d her as an outlier and plucked her from the dirt. Now she’s got a new job collecting offworld data, a path to citizenship, and a near-perfect Wiley City accent. Now she can pretend she’s always lived in the city she grew up staring at from the outside, even if she feels like a fraud on either side of its walls.
But when one of her eight remaining doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined–and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world, but the entire multiverse.
Those Beyond the Wall
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in a searing sci-fi thriller from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds.
Scales is the best at what she She is an enforcer who keeps the peace in Ashtown, a rough, climate-ravaged desert town. But that fragile peace is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed within Ash’s borders, right in front of Scales’s eyes. Even more incomprehensible is that there was seemingly no murderer.
When more mutilated bodies start to turn up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthier, walled-off Wiley City, Scales is tasked with finding the cause—and putting an end to it. She teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist in order to uncover the truth, delving into both worlds to track down the invisible killer. But what they find points to something bigger and more corrupt than they could’ve ever foreseen—and it could spell doom for the entire world.
My Take
SO GOOD. It took me a little while to get into the rhythm and setting but once I did I was riveted, in a good way. I really wanted to find out what happened but I also didn’t want to rush through it; I wanted to savor it. I would definitely recommend reading The Space Between Worlds first. While each could stand alone, I think the second book makes more sense with the context of the first. The Space Between Worlds focuses more on life inside the wall; Those Beyond the Wall takes place outside the wall, and after the events of the first book. There’s much less about the multiverse in the second book, though the multiverse concept drives the plot so knowledge of it is helpful. The second book provides more info about the current world and how it developed, though that is not the focus. It’s much more about describing the here and now and how the story moves forward. Both books feature unusual female main characters. I loved both books and would like to see more in this world and from this author!