The Space Between Worlds

There are many advantages to reading with a book club, including: getting to discuss books with a group, discovering books I might have otherwise been unaware of, and of course friendship and fellowship. One downside though is feeling self-imposed pressure not to DNF a book I'm not enjoying because I don't want to let the group down by not reading it. Sadly this situation was the case with The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson. Imagine a world where the technology needed to travel the multiverse has been invented, the catch being that traveling to world in which the other version of yourself is still alive will kill you. Enter Cara, a traverser who came from impoverished Ash Town, who has died in a huge number of the other worlds making her extremely valuable to Eldridge Institute located in affluent Wiley City. The book has a lot going for it: a queer romance, representation and inclusion of different kinds of people, an inventive take on the multiverse, and relevant dystopian themes about equity. At its absolute best some sections reminded me a bit Butler's The Parable of the Sower, but unfortunately on the whole this book just didn't work for me. It was loaded with exposition and yet still managed to be confusing in its world building for far too long. I also found the fact that people sometimes had different names in the different worlds to be very confusing. Finally, I expected this to be a sci-fi adventure but it's really more of a character driven story with some sci-fi elements. Overall I was bored and confused and found listening to this book to be a bit of a chore. It did pick up a bit eventually, but it simply wasn't to my taste overall. ⭐️⭐️