Sponsored by Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale, with Fierce Reads.
There’s nothing worse than peaking in high school. Nobody knows that better than Josie Pie. She was kind of a big deal—but the bigger you are, the harder you fall. And Josie fell. Hard. Ouch. Meanwhile, her life keeps imploding. Desperate to escape, Josie gets into reading. Literally. She reads a book and suddenly she’s inside it. It’s alarming. But also . . . kind of amazing? It’s the perfect way to live out her fantasies. Book after book, Josie the failed star finds a new way to shine. But the longer she stays in a story, the harder it becomes to escape. Will Josie find a story so good that she just stays forever?
Welcome to Read This Book, a weekly newsletter where I recommend one book that I think you absolutely must read. The books will vary across genre and age category to include new releases, backlist titles, and classics. If you’re ready to explode your TBR, buckle up!
This week’s picks is one of my favorite books of 2020–The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson! To say that this book might be the favorite of the year is no exaggeration–I loved every bit of it!
Content warning: domestic abuse
Cara lives in the future, where walled cities are home to the wealthy and privileged, and communities just outside consist mainly of people of color who struggle to make ends meet in a world vastly affected by climate change. Cara is one of the lucky ones–she’s got a job with the corporation that has perfected multiverse travel, and she works as a traverser. She’s one of the most valuable traversers, in fact, because you can’t travel to worlds where your counterpart is alive, and thanks to her rough upbringing, most of Cara’s doppelgängers are dead. She just needs to keep her head down for four more years and she can apply for citizenship in the city. Cara passes time by flirting with her unavailable handler, Dell, and helping out her family outside the city the best she can. But when she’s sent on a routine mission to a new world where her doppelgänger has recently been murdered, Cara discovers that she’s a pawn in a vast conspiracy–and she has to decide what she’ll do about it.
Cara is the kind of character I love to read–tough but emotionally vulnerable, resourceful but grappling with a secret past that could undo everything in the space of a breath. While the beginning does feel like a bit of a big info-dump, if you stick with it for thirty pages, you begin to get a sense for what a creative, complicated, and vivid world Johnson has created. The social and economical stratifications aren’t so far removed from our own world, and if Cara comes across as hardened, it’s because she grew up in a tough world. You also won’t have to wait very long for the twists to start hitting–Cara is much more complicated than she first appears, and readers will want to pay attention as tiny reveals change your entire understanding of Cara and her world(s). And they never stop, either–chapter after chapter, new twists and surprise developments keep you on your toes. Some of them you’ll see coming, some of them will take you by surprise, but they never stop thrilling, even up until the very end of the book.
I also love that Cara is casually queer in a way where her sexuality isn’t really a big deal, but it does play an important role in the book. Her yearning for Dell, a privileged woman she can’t have, is a huge source of angst, and also symbolic of all the things that Cara wants but can’t have. It also provides wonderful tension as the reader is left to wonder just how much Dell understands about Cara and her secrets. While I won’t say how that pans out, I can tell you that this is not a tragic queer story!
I could go on for pages about why I love this book, but suffice to say it’s one that I know I’ll want to re-read at some point in the future, for enjoyment and also to just marvel at how Johnson put such a complicated story together. I’ve not read this level of plotting since Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows and Ninth House, and honestly, it’s thrilling to know that you’re reading a complicated story masterfully executed!
Happy reading!
Tirzah
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