Micaiah Johnson has done it again. Those Beyond the Wall is an absolute five star read. I will be recommending it to every person who asks me about what book to read next. It is a story that continuously reminds us of the power of a story - of who and how we tell what happened and what becomes truth.

I read The Space Between Worlds in 2020 and I was obsessed with it. I think it was one of the few things in the first 6 months of the pandemic that I felt anything in a time when so much seemed broken. Johnson is one of the few authors I have ever read who can write about the multiverse without confusing the story line or falling prey to a plot hole. She creates stories that work flawlessly beyond the traditional format of a novel's pacing and plotting - you will never know where the story is headed, but you will be drawn into every word of it.

Those Beyond the Wall is brimming with intensity, anger, pain, love and hope. Johnson does not shy away from recognizing the multi faceted dimensions of her characters, and she shows how villains can be heroes, how love can be hate and vice versa, how we witness things, how we name things, and how we take different perceptions and face the difficulty to align that perception on a mass scale.

Johnson manages to write on the human condition and history and social justice and acceptance and hypocrisy and hatred that is so inextricably linked with both the fictional Mr. Scales, Nik Nik, Cara, Adam Bosch, Mr. Cheeks, Mr. Cross, Ashtown and Wiley City and the reality of America in 2020. She commits herself to writing sci-fi live the New Wave in the 1960s, seeing her story through a social justice lens that asks what the world could be, and could one of over 350 worlds ever get it right. Her novels are a tightly controlled exposition on the power of words and actions, and how the fictional settings, no matter what world, are our stories too, if we just pay attention to how they are told.

Johnson has a brief intro to the novel, in which she accounts for her agent recognizing her anger on the page. She created Those Beyond the Wall from her experience in the 62 day sit-in at Nashville, Tennessee's State Capital in 2020. I don't want to give any sort of limited summary about the plot of Those Beyond the Wall - there's absolutely too many layers to share without giving away too much, but I would encourage any reader to also read about The People's Plaza. TN Representative Justin Jones, who made international news when he and Representative Justin J. Pearson were expelled from the TN House for violating the Chamber's "decorum" when they joined protestors for gun safety after the Covenant School shooting in 2023, wrote a book on the 2020 sit-in, and I plan to read that next.

Johnson's bio says she is now studying American Literature at Vanderbilt, but I do hope we see another novel from her soon - her voice and her stories are a powerhouse, and the world would benefit from hearing more.

It pains me to rate this only 3 after how much I loved Johnson’s debut, but where The Space Between Worlds was a hot knife striking fast and true (to the point where you didn’t realize you were bleeding until that knife was already gone), Those Beyond the Wall was a wildly swinging baseball bat: it could deal real damage if it landed exactly right but without several targeted strikes it’ll only bruise.

The first half was chaotic, giving us a muddy picture of who Mr Scales is and what we’re going to be disrupting with the plot. (Meanwhile, if I was the type to annotate, the first pages of The Space Between Worlds would have been marked up all to hell.) Scales has a tendency to break the fourth wall and take a colloquial tone with the reader that feels like performance - keeping even us at arm’s length - so that when she begins to break down and reform, I felt less invested. I also spent a huge portion of the book trying to figure out what role of any Scales played in the last book, which kept me partially distracted from the plot anyway.

We get some really good and interesting moments at the 50% mark and in the last 25% of the book, but even those moments could create enough of a cohesive story to drive the book.

Johnson herself describes this book as “angry” - and that is the truth of it. It highlights oppression and violence and the impracticality of a bloodless revolution, talks about media martyrs and oppression and the myth of peace. And there are no “good guys” in this story, which feels more true than anything else.

I loved the story, the world building and meeting the different characters. I felt completely immersed in the story and couldn't stop reading it.

Those Beyond the Wall came at me like a combination of Vonda McIntyre's The Exile Waiting and a "post-apocalyptic iconoclastic road warrior" novel from the eighties. (Though it might also be said to be a "post-apocalyptic iconoclastic road warrior novel as written by someone who is NOT a conservative, kinda racist anti-intellectual gun nut." That also works.) Our Protagonist is a mechanic/runner called "Mr. Scales." Our Protagonist works for the emperor of a community called Ashtown, which has repeated conflicts and well-justified beefs with the walled city of Wiley.

A number of mysterious murders both inside the city of Wiley and in Ashtown causes the emperor to put Mr. Scales on the case. (It turns out that Mr. Scales at one point lived inside the city as a citizen but ended up in Ashtown as a young teen. She's the best able to get into the city without a "day pass" and without being randomly attacked by the Wiley police force.) She's partnered with another runner named Mr. Cross who she has some history with. Extremely bad history with--but the only possible back up for Mr. Scales because he's white, and will be able to walk in without being asked if he has a permit.

This leads to a complicated story that is both about an invasion from an alternate universe and also about ruthlessness in the service of creating a better world. (Where it actually creates a better world.) This is an angry and violent novel, full of angry and violent people--but the violence here is cathartic rather than for it's own sake, or to glorify the idea of humanity being inherently violent. The anger is directed toward injustice and the cruelty of systemic racism.

Those Beyond the Wall is a fast-paced novel that packs in a lot of tension. (To the point where I ended up peeking at the end to make sure it had a relatively happy, non-horrific ending.) A significant theme that I found interesting was about the creation of stories and the use of propaganda to create support for civil justice actions. This theme has ties to the theme of "ruthlessness in the name of creating a better world," in a number of heartbreaking ways. Overall, I really enjoyed this novel which was a good balance between "thought-provoking" and "action-adventure with lots of boom for your buck."

This review is based on a galley copy received from NetGalley.

I do love a good dystopian vibe and I think this one was executed well. I found the writing to be easy-to-read and the story was engaging. I also quite liked the MC!

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Del Rey, and NetGalley for allowing me to read an early copy of this book!

I was fortunate enough to be able to read The Space Between Worlds as a . . .Read Now, I believe, and then I eagerly purchased a copy of it to own. Those Beyond The Wall I am more fortunate to read early, but I will have to wait to purchase this. I do think that being able to read it this month is extremely sharp, with a further anger of institutional racism in the United States.

It is difficult to not draw comparisons between the ways that governments have wrecked environmental destruction and denied shelter to those they ensured were in more-than-harm's way. It would be more difficult to not bring at least a name to any of them, or bring a name to many of the stories given-- all those Mr. Wills could be, the brutality of Wiley City guards, the inhumanity of those closing the gates and making murder on those who only are trying to survive. And the watchers, and those who are the only ones doing something, carving out their own.

Mr. Scales was a smaller character in TSBW, and it was incredible, to see the differences between herself and Cara. Cara is desperate, secretive, guilty, and ambitious. Mr. Scales? Mr. Scales is *angry*, loving, fiercely loyal, and extremely community-oriented. Her brother, her friend, her people-- and not in that order because of how much she loves all. A deeper, different look into this world's Ashtown from a Nik Nik-loyal runner, from one much closer to Nik without the trauma Cara had and with a far more positive view.

Ashtown is also about the stories-- what they say, how they mean, and why it matters. They do not have to be strictly truthful to have the understood meaning. They do not have to agree for people to know what happened. Three variations of the same story make it all true, because this is what people said, what people heard, and what they took from it, and how it set a fire in people.

Wiley City and Ashtown were not at peace. They never were, and Ashtown must survive without Wiley City killing them.