Still catching up on some of my unreviewed challenge reading from late last year…  My last parallel universe book was Relativity by Cristin Bishara.  Another YA one, it explored how a family and a town can change in different universes.

Ruby’s mother died when she was four; now sixteen, her father recently moved them from California to a tiny town across the country, with a new stepmother and horrible stepsister.  But then Ruby finds a mysterious old oak with a door in the trunk—and going inside takes her to alternate worlds.  What if her mother didn’t die?  What if she had an older brother?  What if the town was a haven for art and science instead of, well, not one?  What if her best friend from California lived in this town instead?  How is Ruby different—and can she find the perfect life?

This was a great one for exploring my favorite parallel universe question—how does one event in the past change everything that follows?  I really enjoyed the exploration of Ruby’s different lives and how different she herself is.  Her desire to find the “perfect” life is very relatable—and heartbreaking, because it’s so clearly a doomed quest. Continue reading “Book Review: Relativity” →

I’m carrying on my parallel universe reading with A Crack in the Line by Michael Lawrence, featuring one of the more unusual alternate life scenarios.

Sixteen-year-old Alaric lost his mother two years earlier in a train accident, following surgery where she had a 50-50 chance of survival.  One day he slips into an alternate version of his house…but in this life his mother survived.  But something else also changed earlier: Alaric meets an alternate version of himself.  Naia is as close to being Alaric as possible–except she’s a girl.  Alaric and Naia begin to explore the differences between their lives, how the parallel worlds work, and mysteries in their family’s past.

This read was a mixed experience.  I liked the concept a lot, and in some places the emotional impact was very well done.  I didn’t mean to read two parallel universe books involving grief in a row; that just kind of happened.  Alaric’s grief over his mother, and the extremely complicated feelings of knowing she’s alive in another universe were well-explored.

I liked the parallel universe mechanics here.  This follows the basic idea of shifts in the key events in the past causing a different present/future.  A lot of versions of that emphasize choice, but this one emphasized even odds.  There’s at least one example where a conscious choice changed things, but the main things (the mother’s survival, Alaric/Naia’s gender) wasn’t really under anyone’s control.  It was just a case of even odds, so universes formed where each option happened.  (It does open the question of whether universes exist for every individual to be gender-swapped…but that’s a bit much to encompass.)  I also liked that it explored multiple changes, instead of just one.  There are at least three key differences between Alaric’s and Naia’s universes, so different results kept happening at different times. Continue reading “Book Review: A Crack in the Line” →

My parallel universe reading has taken me back into some classic science fiction, to read what I believe is the very first published example of a parallel universe story.  At least, that’s what the author’s introduction and Wikipedia say!  Sidewise in Time and Other Scientific Adventures by Murray Leinster was an excellent collection of shockingly prescient stories from the 1930s and 40s, leaving me wondering why I’ve never heard of this author before!

“Sidewise in Time” is a novella, so I’m counting it as a read for my challenge.  It features a collision between universes (I think—it’s technobabble), such that suddenly different patches of parallel universes are aligned.  So as you move geographically across land, you also pass into patches of other universes.  And just to make it even messier, nothing’s settled so the universes are still moving.  The story mostly follows one group of explorers moving through portions of Virginia and in and out of universes, with intermittent sections on other chaos happening elsewhere.

It’s a good story in its own right, but I was fascinated by how complete this idea of parallel universes was, here in its first incarnation.  Leinster has fully established the concept of different occurrences in the past spawning new universes, with subsequent different results in the present. Continue reading “Book Review: Sidewise in Time” →