Finna by Nino Cipri

(January List)

Finna is the first of my TBR.co reads for the year. Originally, this was 19th on the list for January and I'm really nowhere near there in my reading. However, I realized that if I wanted to get all three in by March 12th, that I really needed to go ahead and bump one. I bumped Finna because it's more of a novella coming in at just 135 pages and I needed a nice short read after finishing Caliban's War.

The premise of this novel is that layout structure of a store called LitenVarld makes it prone to wormholes. Really, LitenVarld is obviously based off of Ikea and it's rather distinctive store layouts. If you've never been in one, they really are oddly disorientating. In the world of the novel, this disorientation makes it more likely that a wormhole to an alternate reality will open. This happens often enough that the corporation has a strategy in place for retrieving hapless shoppers who've accidently gotten themselves lost. However, due to budget cuts, when the elderly Ursula Noouri gets herself lost, there is no team to go retrieve her. Instead, the two employees with the least seniority are drafted to wield the Finna device and find the errant shopper. Unfortunately for Jules and Ava, that means that not only do they have to face dangers of the multiverse, they have to do it after having broken up only three days prior. Super awkward.

Conceptually fascinating, I felt like the relationship drama between Jules and Ava just really dragged the story down.  What saved it was the background concept of being lost in a morass of Ikea clones and it's short length. I take that back. If all that drama had been spread across 300 pages and the rest of it had more room to breath, this could have been an absolutely breath-taking book. It really felt like the interesting settings and multiversal elements were rushed through in favor of Ava having these introspective sessions.

I'm going to track down the sequel and see how the author is developing their craft.