The Space Between Worlds

3+/5. Young woman is a traverser, meaning she works for the corporation that sends people to alternate universes, mostly to extract resources from them. She is valuable because you can only enter an alternate universe where your alter self is dead, and so the best traversers are people who survived when most of their alters didn't, which generally translates to people from violent or deeply deprived backgrounds. Then stuff happens.

I enjoyed this, and found it frustrating. It's a great concept, somewhat lessened in impact by the narrator's commitment to telling you about how privilege and the lack of it works over and over and over again. Yes, I got it, literally before the first time you explained it, let alone the twentieth. But there's a cleverness to the shuffling universes here, to how they reset the main cast into new configurations. It's not like fanfiction invented multi-AUs, but the emphasis here on personal trauma and confronting the fact that an evil person can be a decent guy under other circumstances feels a bit fannish to me. And yeah, there's a lesbian romance, though I was never really sold on why they liked each other, or whether they should at all.

So in short: great idea, I hope her future books are a little more disciplined and willing to let things stand for themselves without lampshading so vigorously.

Content notes: Violence, references to abusive relationships.