MY ⭐️ RATING: 4/5
Format: Kindle Whispersync
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Lee’s best friend went missing on Bodmin Moor, four years ago. She and Mal were chasing rumours of monsters when they found something all too real. Now Mal is back, but where has she been, and who is she working for? When government physicist Kay Amal Khan is attacked, the security services investigate. This leads MI5’s Julian Sabreur deep into terrifying new territory, where he clashes with mysterious agents of an unknown power who may or may not be human.
And Julian’s only clue is some grainy footage – showing a woman who supposedly died on Bodmin Moor. Khan’s extradimensional research was purely theoretical, until she found cracks between our world and countless others.
Parallel Earths where monsters live. These cracks are getting wider every day, so who knows what might creep through? Or what will happen when those walls finally come crashing down…
MY REVIEW
This story follows 6 different characters, and I really enjoyed all of them, but Lee and Mal who are basically the main 2 of the 6 characters, were my favorites. Especially after the way Tchaikovsky introduced them in chapter 1, I immediately was interested to see how their stories played out. Though there wasn’t a ton of character development with the characters, he did a great job of creating a very diverse cast of characters, including gay and trans characters that played pivotal roles.
This is a plot driven story based in London with many tense scenes filled with mystery and adventures. It had a good medium pacing to it, not too slow, not too fast. Some of the worlds were so fascinating in how they work, if left me in a bit of awe and wonder. There was one major HOLY CRAP moment I had, I was just absolutely stunned that it happened! I also got a few chuckles out of the many pop culture references that were dropped throughout the story, from Alice Through the Looking Glass, to Jurassic Park, to Star Wars, the story was littered with them. The narration by Sophie Aldred was pretty phenomenal, she did such a great job of getting into the characters emotions and voices. One voice in particular, Stig, reminded me of Sigrud from Robert Jackson Bennett’s, Divine Cities trilogy.
“You’re quiet, now, subdued by what we’ve shown you. How many times can you watch the world end, after all, even if it’s not your world?”
This is a really well written story and clearly well researched, at the end of the book, Tchaikovsky has special acknowledgements where he gives credit to the help he got with research and getting information on the story to feel as accurate as possible from police procedures to paleontology and biology. This felt like a sci-if tv series that I would’ve loved to have watched unfold. Multiple worlds, one with freaking dinosaurs, that felt a bit like Land of the Lost could’ve been some inspiration, and a few others that would be too spoilery to mention. With that said, the interludes between most of the chapters, were a bit different and took some getting used to. At first I found them a bit boring and took me out of the reading experience, but they got better as I started to realize that they held integral bits of information to the story.
For someone who doesn’t actually read a lot of Science fiction, I found this to be quite interesting and it definitely made me want to check out more of Tchaikovsky’s work with how much he put into getting it to feel as accurate as he could with very likable characters. Aside from the interludes that took me out of it for the first part of it, I really enjoyed the complexity and the creativity with some ideas that were very outside of the box, with building this tantalizing story.
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