A Million Worlds with You Review

This week's novel is A Million Worlds with You by Claudia Gray, the final book in the Firebird Series.

The awful Triad Corporation has a hideous scheme to completely destroy a bunch of the alternate universes.  Marguerite's parents and their grad students have found a way to protect the universes, but an evil version of Marguerite (dubbed "Wicked") is jumping through the universes, setting up all the versions of herself to die so our Marguerite can no longer enter those universes to save them.  Marguerite must jump from universe to universe, following Wicked, saving herself over and over, and stalling for time so her parents can save all the universes they can.

This was an exciting set up.  Marguerite can't jump into a universe where Wicked already is, so she has to wait until Wicked moves on.  Wicked can't flat out kill herself in another universe or she'll die too, so she has to set events into motion that will kill her and then jump out of the universe real fast.  This gives Marguerite a short window to get in, figure out what the trap is, stop it, and then wait while Wicked sets up some other elaborate booby trap in the next universe.  The traps are exciting, but there's tension in the uncertainty as to how the traps will spring, where the traps are, what's gone wrong this time.  And then once Marguerite has saved herself, there's the tension of waiting and wondering what Wicked is up to.  The tension stays high and that's a lot of fun.

I also liked how Marguerite has moved past "if this one version of a person is bad, then every version of that person is bad and just hasn't been bad yet" and moved on to putting herself in Wicked's place and thinking about what parts of her personality if put in the situation Wicked was in would make her act that way.  It made Wicked more sympathetic, but also made Marguerite more sympathetic, and it was rewarding to see how she'd matured about the situation and how she was able to empathize.  It's still a little off-putting (understandable and believable, but still off-putting) that she comes to this realization when faced with an evil version of herself.  When faced with an evil Theo in the first book, she was convinced that her Theo was evil too.  Then in the second book, when faced with violent versions of Paul (her boyfriend), she was more forgiving, but still uncomfortable.  It was only when she was faced with an evil version of herself that she really started to find forgiveness.

And then Marguerite's reactions to Paul's "brokenness" drove me nuts.  In the last book, Paul's soul was splintered into pieces and Marguerite collected them all and brought them back together.  When we last saw Paul, he was distressed over witnessing what other versions of himself were capable of.  It's been a while since I read it, but my reaction was, "Poor Paul needs some hugs and ice cream and maybe some therapy."  Marguerite's reaction was, "Paul is broken forever."  She'd spoken to Paul about it once and they did no research and about an hour and a half had passed since his soul came back together.  Let the guy take a nap before you give up on him!  It made me angry.  Eventually, she and Paul do talk about it, and they get an oscilloscope to look at his brain and get some graphs that look like bad news, but then neither one of them knows how to read oscilloscope-brain-graphs, so who knows.  At this point Paul decides that he's broken forever (which is obnoxious).  Marguerite hears him say this, and--just to be contrary--decides he'll be fine and they'll work it out.  Even though I agree with her, it was still annoying because she was still making decisions about someone else's brain without any scientific evidence and without listening to what Paul's saying.  I know I'm doing the same thing and I don't know why it gets me so rankled, but it does.

Anyway.  Aside from how much I don't want to hear about Marguerite's personal drama when universes are being ripped apart in epic volcano-doomed glory, this was an exciting book and a fun series.

***

Next week: Jane Steele, a retelling of Jane Eyre with more homicide, by Lyndsay Faye.