Raquel Petra has everything she could ever want - her wife Marlena, their daughter Atalanta, and a job working alongside Marlena as researchers for the Institute. Specifically, the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds, which investigates little bubbles of parallel reality, and the elusive points that connect them to our own. Then, with one tiny mistake, Raquel loses everything in an instant.

Time runs fast in some of these worlds, slow in others. This leads to a wide variety of imaginative uses for time dilation, which is one of my favourite things in the story. Grow crops very quickly in a fast world, then store them in a slow world so they don’t go off. Calculating how old somebody is requires keeping track of all the worlds they’ve been in. 

Because the points where you enter a world can be attached to a movable physical object, which can itself be brought inside another world, you end up with worlds within worlds, and all the complexities that might imply. It’s a great science fiction concept to build the tale around, but all the other aspects here shine just as much.

This is a story anchored in the Dominican Republic. Raquel works as an archeologist, exploring the pocket worlds for evidence of the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean, something that becomes more relevant as things progress.

On a broader view, it is very much about colonialism, capitalism, environmental disaster, and war. But, primarily it’s about one person’s sadness, grief, and complete self-destructive refusal to let go of what she lost. Those are the parts that really stuck with me after I had finished reading. Ultimately, it’s also about hope, something I am personally very glad for, and you will be too. This story hurts in all the right ways.

Highly recommended.

Thanks to Tor for the early review copy.