Ten Thousand Skies Above You by Claudia Gray

Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. The inventiveness of the many worlds Marguerite traverses should keep fans happy. Characters remain fairly shallow but accessible. Although overlong, the book holds readers’ interest with drastic changes of scene as Marguerite jumps from world to world. The suspense ratchets up as Marguerite begins to question Paul’s character when she meets different versions of him on different worlds, knowing that all are essentially the same person and positioning Marguerite for some unexpected moral choices. The author creates some intriguing worlds: there’s one in which a world war dominates everything and another which, if readers spot a small hint, they might recognize as our own, adding a nice twist to the story.

On one world, however, she learns that a new technology threatens all worlds, including her own. On her travels she learns some disturbing things about Paul even as she tries to outwit Conley. If Marguerite sabotages the Firebird technology in other universes, thus allowing Conley to control it all, he will give her the coordinates necessary to find all the parts of Paul’s soul. Villain Wyatt Conley, tech whiz and corporate mogul, has splintered Paul’s soul into four parts. Marguerite travels with her friend Theo through the multiverse to new worlds (here persistently called “dimensions”) with her parents’ marvelous Firebird device, trying to save Paul, the love of her life. The parallel-universe sci-fi/romance story begun with A Thousand Pieces of You (2014) continues.

Ten Thousand Skies Above You by Claudia Gray