![]() ![]() She is very self-interested and spiky, a result of her rough and difficult upbringing, so she doesn’t fit into the mould of lovable heroine that we might want from a book like this. Indeed, Cara is a great example of an unlikable protagonist. It’s hard to pretend to be someone you’re not, even when that person is also you. As Cara travels to visit her family in Ashtown, and flirts/spars with her handler, Dell, we see the cracks in her facade. Up until that point, I wasn’t sure what Johnson was playing with here-there are so many directions a multiverse story can go in! When she revealed Cara is not actually from this Earth, holy wow, yes, I was so in for stakes like that. Unfortunately for Cara, it isn’t even clear who her allies or-or her enemies.Ĭara’s secret identity is revealed early in the book (this is why it’s a minor spoiler) and is what got me hooked on the whole plot. So she has to find a way to protect her interests, lest she is deported back to the impoverished town on the outskirts of Wiley City that she hails from (in any universe). Matters at Eldridge are coming to a head, because Cara and all the other traversers might be out of a job soon. ![]() But Cara has secrets-for one thing, she isn’t Caramenta from this Earth 0 she is Caralee from Earth 22, who managed to impersonat Caramenta after the latter arrived, broken and dying, on Caralee’s Earth (this is what happens when you try to visit an Earth where your counterpart lives). ![]() She travels to these worlds to collect information that could enrich Eldridge. She is useful because she has died in most of the nearly 400 worlds that the corporation can access. Minor spoilers in this book because it is rather difficult to discuss the story without them, but I won’t spoil anything major.Ĭara is one of a small number of people who are useful to the Eldridge corporation as traversers, world-walkers. This is a postcolonial novel about not belonging, about belonging only when you are useful, and how you calibrate your life when that is all you know how to do. The fact it has a queer protagonist of colour? Even better! Indeed, Micaiah Johnson isn’t just telling a multiverse thriller here. I do so love parallel-universe fiction and other, similar, world-hopping stories, so I was excited for The Space Between Worlds. Ultimately, Sera Dubash faces a decision that will force her to choose between loyalty to gender and friendship or loyalty to her social position and class.The idea of the multiverse is captivating, no? The thought that there are infinitely-many yous out there, that at any moment the choice you make diverges you from them a little more. Despite their class differences, the two women are bound by gender and shared life experiences – both had marriages that started out with great romantic love and promise, but ended up as crushing disappointments. Set in contemporary Bombay, ‘The Space Between Us’ tells the story of Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and Bhima, the woman who works as a domestic servant in her home. ![]() She worked in the house I grew up in, year after year, a shadow flitting around our middle-class home, her thin brown hands cleaning furniture she was not allowed to sit on, cooking food she was not allowed to share at the family dining table, dusting the stereo that mainly played American rock and roll, music that was alien and unfamiliar to her, that only reminded her of her nebulous presence in our home, our world, our lives.’ In this beautifully crafted novel about the interlinked lives of two women, Thrity Umrigar explores the complex relationships between the classes in India, rarely addressed in contemporary fiction. ![]()
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