Cached US Kindle giveaway on bsky: 11 copies of Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson, over at https://bsky.app/profile/kithrup.bsky.social/post/3lcxwpza2rc2h
Cached US Kindle giveaway: 11 copies of Those Beyond the Wall @micaiahjohnson.bsky.social, which I have, which is why there are 11 copies this time. If you read it let me know what you think please. The title keeps making me think of Omelas. #KindleBookGiveaway
Those Beyond the Wall: A Novel - Kindle edition by Johnson, Micaiah. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Those Beyond the Wall: A Novel.
There are gruesome deaths, there are horrible things happening to kids. It's not easy to read, and yet it's satisfying, and so very good.
There's the more nuanced look at Ashtown we get, a look from the inside: how the runners are brutal yet bound by a code of honor; what useful services the local brothel provides.
We stay firmly rooted on one Earth here, but feel the possibility of other lives too, as characters reinvent themselves and make new lives.
(4/n)
This book manages, despite its political foreword, not to be manifesto, but a complex story. A story of getting out and starting anew; a story of finding love; and a story of the power of stories itself and how they can build community and new cooperation.
A gruesome, yet hopeful story.
(5/n, n=5)
Cooperation between the City and Ashtown; cooperation between Ashtown and the religious communities of the Rurals. And cooperation between a scientific approach and phenomena that might as well be magical.
This book, as the author notes, is angry: at violent cops, at people donating useless rubbish, at people abusing children, at bigoted people, at people using cheap labor without helping those in need. It's angry, and it's violent.
(3/n)
We follow her and her fellow Ashtowners after a series of brutal deaths - which are, as we soon learn, caused by people from another, parallel Earth traversing into theirs.
Working out a way to stop this invasion requires enlisting the help of Cara, who used to traverse between worlds as a job before that business went down, and Adam Bosch, inventor of the traversing technology, now severely disabled.
It also requires a new kind of cooperation.
(2/n)
So. Micaiah Johnson's "Those Beyond the Wall". Set years after the events of "The Spaces Between Worlds'", on their Earth zero, it's told by Mr. Scales, who's open about bring kind of an unreliable narrator who cares more about the story that about its truth.
Mr. Scales is a runner: an enforcer, fixer, and mechanic, among other things, in the slum of Ashtown, located in the toxic desert under the dangerous sun just outside of Wiley City's protective walls.
(1/n)
Random thought: Cara, world-walker, spy, trickster, fond of list-making and analysis, sometimes pawn of larger forces, a person who's remade herself and uses cover identities - she's a bit like Odysseus, isn't she.
Now, is Mr. Cheeks Achilles?
This book is making me want to write essays. On its different types of law enforcement, their ethics and codes of conduct and uses of violence. On the names we choose, the stories we tell to forge an identity, a life, and what that means in a multiverse. And of course, I never wrote "Why 'The Space Between Worlds' is far better than 'The Long Earth'", did I.
“No one had ever protected me from harm before. Not my mother, not my older brother. No one. But when you came, you stopped it like it was obvious that it should stop."
May everyone have a person like that.
(Wow, I just realized that the childhood stuff in this one actually triggers me. I didn't survive anything near as bad as the things described. And yet.)
Sean Eric Fagan
Jules