"the person who's come to my rescue is exactly who I expect: me."

before reading it, i could already appreciate The Space Between Worlds for simply not being another multiverse story about a perfect white man being taken away from his perfect white family. Micaiah Johnson chooses instead to tell us about plausible social implications of the multiverse. weaving an impressive prose for a debut author (take notes, Blake Crouch), she tackles tough topics without being preachy or letting her own voice leak through the characters's while defending her case —a considerable feat in a first-person narration that even some books in third-person can't accomplish. the casual bi rep was also a welcome surprise.

yet, you'd think a story about parallel worlds between which only the scum of society can travel would be more exciting than this. beyond the premise (no one can visit a version of Earth where their counterpart is still alive, so most privileged and sheltered people are unable to), the worldbuilding is misty and lackluster. there's nothing extremely wrong about it, but nothing exactly right either.

you can't complain about info dump here, as a reviewer did; on the contrary: you keep waiting for the author to get to the specifics (what war? which religion? why are the emperor's runners so loyal? does half of the city live in this endless building or am i tripping?) and she seldom does, so the portrayed cultures along with their history remain blurry images, more like parts of a lost island than of our future world. spending an entire book with these people isn't enough to get to know them well, because most characters' motivations, backstories and relationships are never fully explained or explored. showing her skill, Johnson naturally drops some info and hints along the way for the reader to follow and be able to make guesses; and, granted, it would be an amateur mistake to over-explain things in a first-person narration done by a character not at all strange to the setting and who only deals with people familiar with it as well. the vague exposition, however, is insufficient to ground the story and make it a standalone. like Mad Max Fury Road without the efficiency of Mad Max Fury Road. that movie gives an immersive glimpse of a post-apocalyptic world and its society; this book gives way more than a glimpse of a futuristic and dystopian Earth, but doesn't manage to fully immerse you in it, so the reader stays floating in open sea.

the romance makes it all more lifeless. since the story starts six years after the two women met at work, the relationship doesn't unfold; their connection, feelings and admiration are just stated again and again in a dispassionate example of telling-not-showing. besides, i didn't get why the protagonist was so interested in her stupidly rich superior, who she believed to be "classist to the bone" and "disgusted by the idea of her". understandable to feel attracted to the woman even while holding to this belief; being romantically invested in her from the get-go that i find weird. the mc has more chemistry with the religious version of her ex as well as his less aggressive alternative than with the love of her life.

now, my biggest problem with this book coincides with my biggest problem as a reader: my inability to continue to respect a strong main character once they start making dumb decisions for convenience or to further the plot. i can't take seriously any reasonable thing they think, do or say after that. [mild spoilers ahead] if the protagonist in question has always had everything and everyone against them and decides to play the hero in favor of the same people who have wronged them, causing a true friend or ally to suffer the consequences in their place, i might actually wish them to die so the book can end faster.

for that reason, The Space Between Worlds felt a bit too long, despite all the plot lines and plot holes the author wanted to fit into it. i couldn't fathom why a black woman who had been in survival mode her whole life suddenly cared so much about the super-rich's lives. the funny thing is that another character literally points out that these fuckers have let multiple genocides happen, and she's still like "nop, i don't care about any of that, im in my dumb mode now, ready to contradict everything my inner voice has made clear about me up until this point, even if it puts my whole family at risk". with all the discussion on identity and belonging —and the mc's relatable desire to get as far away as possible from her upbringing, a desire that doesn't stop her from missing home— it would make much more sense for her to feel obliged to do something if the threat she tries to fight were first and foremost against her people.

"you'd think someone who'd seen her own corpse would be smarter than that." my thoughts exactly.

and so the most likable characters ended up being a man named Nik Nik and another called Mr. Cheeks, both victims of wasted potential and anticlimactic storylines.