Absolutely incredible! Like if In The Dream House and Everything Everywhere All At Once merged into one, then an additional level of surrealism I couldn't get enough of. Going to be thinking about this one for awhile.

this is one of the most inventive and beautiful books I've ever read!!! I just finished it an hour ago and already know I'll be thinking about it for a long long time. stories about the multiverse are intimidating, and I often worry that a writer won't know how to make it make sense to a tiny lil brain like mine. but emet north absolutely nailed it and I'm just genuinely taken aback by what a beautiful and complex book they've written.

I loved the way this book dived deep into trauma, mental health, queerness, identity and the sacred uniqueness of our realities as we know them. I loved the way it felt almost like a collection of short stories - each chapter so creative and fully capable of standing as it's own story - all with overlapping characters and details and themes that are constantly tying and tangling beautifully. north has an incredibly gorgeous writing style and there were so many gutting lines I wanted to underline but to do so I would've to underline the whole page before and the whole page after just to catch the full beauty of what they were saying.

so! consider me a fan!!! I could go on but I'll just say that this book really rocked my world and I can't wait to recommend it to everyone

thanks netgalley and harper for the e-arc! <3

This is a novel of multitudes! The Universes is plural because in this beautiful novel you will meet Raffi in a variety of scenarios where she interacts with several characters but in many, many different ways. As we meet Raffi as a young girl, a teenager and an adult, Britt, Graham and Kay reappear as friends, enemies and lovers and we travel with her through the universes as she discovers what is truly important.

North has created a masterpiece for anyone who wonders what life could be in another time or place. Sliding Doors, Michael Cunningham and many other favorites come to mind and I highly recommend this beautiful work.
#harper #inuniverses #emetnorth

Parts I and II were about 3.5 stars; Part III (and especially the last chapter) made it 4 stars.

I enjoyed this, though it wasn’t quite what I expected. I thought this book would be literary sci-fi, like SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel, or HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK by Sequoia Nagamatsu. But most of it reads like contemporary literary fiction that just barely has a speculative premise on a technicality. There are a few chapters with a magical realism feel, and one chapter with an alien invasion, but a lot of the chapters are basically just realistic fiction. Luckily, I like realistic fiction, but this was more realistic-adjacent than the marketing (the cover, the title, the comps) implied. That said, Carmen Maria Machado comp feels reasonably accurate.

The book is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection. Much of the book feels lacking in plot and direction—I enjoyed each chapter/story individually, but for a while they didn’t really seem to add up to anything when put together. But the setup pays off eventually. The last chapter made me feel like the book was sticking the landing, but the last scene was a bit of a wobble: it wasn’t entirely narratively satisfying, because it didn’t feel like the main character had a truly meaningful choice to make (for spoilery reasons). But, overall, the last chapter was beautiful and made me cry.

The sentence-level prose is good, and the book has a lovely dreamlike quality. It feels a bit like a Charlie Kaufman film.

I would recommend this book for character-driven readers of slice-of-life literary fiction (who are okay with their fiction getting weird sometimes). I would not recommend it for plot-driven readers or for readers who only like sci-fi.

I wish I could read this book again for the first time. That is my highest praise for a book. I will start with that.

Raffi and a handful of their friends and family are presented in different versions of how life might have turned out. While most are rearrangements of the world we know, there are a few with interesting variations like an octopus living under one's skin. But the interesting thing about this book is not the worlds, but the different ways that Raffi and friends interact, swapping roles of friend, lover, mentor. And through it all is this lingering struggle of Raffi to find their way. Featuring queer characters, a few personal ghosts, and suicidal ideation, this book is touching, perhaps even heart wrenching at times. I loved this book. I'm so glad it exists in the world.

I'm sure many will be thrilled with this story. It was OK for me, but I may not be the right audience for this. I can see the talent and I enjoyed aspects of this one.

I really appreciate the free copy for review!!

"But the truth is that time is neither a river nor an arrow. It is a dimension, and our lives stretch across it, each of us a four-dimensional shape, taking up some small space in the universe. All moments existing at once and forever."

The poetic exploration of kaleidoscopic parallel universes in this book makes it hard for the literal reader to weave a single thread through the plot. You are not meant to read this story, you're meant to fall into the worlds the author puts together and follow the journey with your heart.

"I loved him like my left hand, without which it would be difficult to tie my shoes or chop an onion. But I would still be able to make circles around stars. The days I woke to find myself weightless"

There's so much beauty, so much grief, so much joy, so much self-exploration in this story. Just when you think you know what's going on, things shift. New openings, new perspectives, and new unknowns welcome you.

"It doesn’t take so much to make a life. A small group of kind people. Work that leaves a body tired enough for sleep. A little house with a bed and a chair. Food grown in the fields or gardens. Letters I write to the people I love, even knowing I can’t send them."

I loved following Raffi's journey, I loved the writing, I loved the journey that the book took me on.

with gratitude to Harper and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review

Not fully sold on this one. I think I see what the author is trying to do, but there is too much disconnect in the middle chapters for it to hold together and make sense to me. Novels in the style frequently leave pieces unexplained and to the reader’s implication, but this one leaves too much, feels too disconnected.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper for the early copy of this absolutely mindblowing book!

There are some books and some writers that are so awe-inspiring and achingly beautiful that they widen your universe, they push on the edges of your reality, and create space for something new. Emet North and IN UNIVERSES did more than just expand my one singular life and universe, this book, like the world inside of it, made my own universe feel vast and multitudinous. North's skill with prose rearranged everything inside of me, I don't know a better modern writer. These universes, these characters, and these worlds will impress upon me for a long long time.

This book is perfect for fans of queer and human-soaked fiction with whispers of sci-fi, like Emily St. John Mandel, Ted Chiang, or Carmen Maria Machado.

I can't wait to make every single person I know read this book. I can't wait to read this book again. I can't wait to follow the inevitable rocket that will be North's literary career.

wildly queer, wildly weird, and a simply gorgeous adventure throughout space and time, and universes of all kinds. thanks for the arc.

This was good. Very good. In fact, there’s a very good chance this book is brilliant. It’s certainly one of the best I’ve read in some time. One of those books that awes you as a reader and humbles you as a writer.
Everything about it, from the cleverly constructed many-worlds narrative to the language itself is a thing of singular beauty.
Quantum physics and personal connections are the two constant and equally unfathomable factors that the protagonist of this novel wrestles with, from page to page, from world to world. And it is a journey well worth taking.
Emotionally evocative, gut-wrenchingly real, wildly imaginative, vividly rendered, terribly romantic even … in what universe would you not want to read it?
Well done, Emet North! Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This is an evocative elegy, pondering how hope and regret are two sides of a mobius strip that stretches across realities. The writing is both tender and devastating, drawing you in time and again. Every chapter is a slight step sideways, the characters always the same and yet different across these multiverses, and through these multi-faceted mirrors there are some clear pictures of character that develop.

With that said, I don’t know what I expected, but by the end I was still a little underwhelmed. There is no plot, there are just over-arching motifs that are repeated and riffed upon. The reason this kind of emotional wandering did not work for me is because, while the reader understands we are glimpsing these different realities, just one choice away from one another, the characters are all isolated. There is no character journey from the beginning to the end. Every chapter feels like the sketch of a different story, like any one of them could be expanded out into something else, and the reader, a voyeur across realities, can draw connections but the characters aren’t afforded that same grace. I really wanted something connecting every chapter, every story, more than just vibes. I wanted growth and realization and heartbreak and apotheosis to happen within the worlds of the story.

Each chapter, each permutation, was creative and interesting. They did add to one another to give a more robust whole than the individual parts. And as I mentioned at the outset, the writing is wonderful—delicate and alluring, with a little bit of ethereality that still packs an emotional punch. I enjoyed this story, and there is a lot to meditate on here. Those who are less attached to plot and enjoy a good dream/vibes story will definitely find a lot to bask in, here, because it has a lot of ideas and is pleasant to read. For me I really wanted something a little more, something to connect everything together on a narrative level, and that is what my rating reflects, but depending on your reading style your mileage will definitely vary.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Harper, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I think there's something beautiful, enchanting and sad about the complicity of "not understanting the universe together". WOW. So much more than I expecting. It's like a love letter to sci-fi and time travel, through queer contemporary eyes.

#InUniverses #NetGalley

Is it fair to call a book boring because you thought it was going to be something it isn’t? Can I call this a bad book when I have a sneaking suspicion that I Just Don’t Get It?

I think I can.

As a science fiction novel, this is fucking terrible. It’s slow and dreary and the scifi elements are relegated to the background when they appear at all – and they often don’t; every ‘chapter’ is functionally a standalone short story, featuring different versions of the same character/s, and the majority of them contain no scifi stuff at all, nor do they explore or play with scifi themes and tropes. There are so many ways to play with gender and sexuality in SFF – The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum comes immediately to mind – and none of that is happening here. The blurb is phrased in such a way that I took it to mean we were going to be following one character moving through different universes, something in a similar vein to Nathan Tavares’ Fractured Infinity. That is not what this is! We, the reader, are taking peeks at different realities, at different versions of Raffi in different timelines, but they are all entirely separate; this isn’t a scifi adventure, it’s a collection of short stories about the same characters. Instead of a queer physicist hopping from world to world, we’re reading about professors who are unhappy in their academic success, kids who bow under to peer-pressure, women too cowardly to confess their true feelings to a partner; blah, blah, blah. It’s the kind of Lit Fic nonsense we mock Lit Fic for being, for crying out loud; if it were entertaining, I might even consider whether North intended this book as some kind of satire or spoof on that genre. But I think not: it takes itself too seriously, and is just so mind-numbingly boring, to be (successfully) doing something sneaky and clever.

As a literary fiction novel… Look, I’m not qualified to make that judgement. I hate Literary Fiction with a passion and think it’s all pretentious drivel by default. It is genuinely possible that I Just Don’t Get what North was doing here. But speaking as a nonbinary person, I didn’t see anything being said about gender or sexuality at all, never mind something smart or interesting being said, never mind it being done well or poorly. In some of the vignettes the main character was queer, or sapphic, or nonbinary, and in some they weren’t, or at least did not appear to be: being married to a man doesn’t make a woman straight, of course, but if that’s all I see in that particular vignette, I have nothing else to go on. Using she/her pronouns (as the MC does for at least the first half of the book) doesn’t make you a woman, for that matter – I use she/her pronouns, and am decidedly not a girl – but when a character uses she/her and spends her time obsessing over sandcastles and Shakespeare’s Ophelia, I have no evidence suggesting she’s not cis. It sucks that our society defaults to cishet, that I need evidence of obvious queerness to recognise a character as queer, but the fact is that I do. It’s not like that in real life – in real life, you can call yourself queer and I need no more evidence than that to consider you queer. But when we’re talking about a fictional character, I need to be shown, and in many of the chapters I read, I was not.

On the other hand, sometimes we did get that; in several chapters/universes Raffi is a woman attracted to women, or men and women; sometimes Raffi is nonbinary. But that in and of itself isn’t saying anything interesting. So, not all versions of us across the multiverse will have the same sexuality and/or gender identity: I mean, le duh??? Is that the Big Deal that’s supposed to be blowing my mind? I took that as read long before I even heard of this book. Hells, I would argue that Orphan Black did a better job of showing how wildly different different versions of us could potentially be – including Tony, the trans clone we barely met, who I wish we’d seen more of – and that all took place in one universe!

Insert me banging my head against the desk here.

Push comes to shove, In Universe is a series of vignettes about a person who has depression of varying levels in a lot of the various versions of their life, a person who is not interesting and does nothing interesting, who is sometimes self-destructive in eye-rollingly obvious, even clichéd, ways. I skipped ahead to part 3 and that was no more promising than the first half of the book. It’s mundane and dull and banal, and yes all those words mean the same thing but I had to read dozens of boring versions of the same person’s boring life so you can deal with three synonyms.

Please let me go back to the sci fi that goes pew pew, thanks.

An absorbing exploration of a kaleidoscopic set of parallel worlds – delving into trauma, grief, and the complexities of healing from our fractures. 

North’s writing is engaging and imaginative in the ways it plumbs the depths of Raffi’s psyche and their search for belonging. As the kaleidoscope turns, each subsequent world spins off its axis. Details change, relationships flip, and roles reverse, but some version of Raffi remains a constant amidst the swirling chaos.

I really enjoyed my time immersed in the pages of In Universes. It’s a compelling and vivid read bound to pull you into its multiversal web.

this is the best book i've read in a while. absolutely gorgeous writing, queer multiverses, surreal worlds. i read it voraciously.