Finna
The LitenVerse series, Book 1
Nino Cipri
Tordotcom
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: If retail work is Hell, then the Swedish-based home furnishing store LitenVärld is its own circle of that Hell. It's bad enough dealing with the disorienting, mazelike floor plan composed of a series of bizarre themed rooms, but now Ava has to cope with a bad breakup involving another employee, Jules. She even shuffled her schedule to avoid being there at the same time as them, even though the odds of the two crossing paths in the cavernous place were minimal. Then Derek calls out sick one dismal February day, so Ava has to slog in to work - and, of course, who does she run into almost first thing in the door but Jules. Just one day, she tells herself. She can get through just this one day in the same building as her ex. What could go wrong?
When a distraught customer tells the manager that her grandmother has vanished, Ava doesn't find it too alarming. Hell, she's an employee and even she gets turned around in this place. But when she goes to look where the woman was last spotted, she finds two things: Jules, and a weird room that definitely was not on the floor plan this morning... a room just beyond a weird glowing purple ring.
According to the manager and a poorly-dubbed training video, this is "just" a wormhole; the poor old woman must've wandered through into one of countless parallel dimensions with their own parallel LitenVärlds, some less hospitable than others. There used to be an entire team dedicated to wormhole retrieval, but cost cutting measures left the store with just a handheld "finna" device to track the wayward traveler, to be carried through the portal by whichever employees draw the short straw - inevitably, Ava and Jules.
REVIEW: I have been inside an IKEA (which "LitenVärld" is quite clearly inspired by) only once in my life, but that was more than enough: a strange, cramped maze of stuff, funneling customers from points A to Z without deviation or delay, disgorging the masses at the food court/checkout like spitting products off the end of an entirely impersonal assembly line. As dehumanizing and disorienting as that shopping experience was, I can only imagine how it feels to employees... and if an extra dimension or a thousand were tacked on, that would be a punishment worthy of anything Dante dreamed up.
Cipri takes the hellscape that is modern retail employment and crosses it with the multiverse, which adds a whole new chapter of canned responses to the managerial handbook and a whole new tier of instructional videos to be shown to hapless employees. In LitenVärld, the opening of a wormhole in the middle of the store is just an unfortunate side-effect of their innovative layouts, and one more onerous duty for management to drop onto underpaid and undertrained employees - incentivized not by bonuses or overtime (perish the thought), but with gift cards to a cheap restaurant... because, by management's logic, what low-wage worker wouldn't risk their lives for a discounted bowl of pasta? Ava already didn't want to be at work to begin with, still nursing a days-old breakup. Jules loathes every minute of every day they have to spend in the horrid place; the chance to explore the multiverse appeals strongly to the wanderlust they've nursed since childhood but have so rarely been able to afford to indulge. The two are forced to cooperate as they step through the purple ring and into their first other dimension, guided by the fickle "finna" that points the way but utterly fails to warn them of the many dangers they encounter in the worlds they're compelled to cross (because of course it can't be as simple as finding the old woman in the first place they go... or, rather, it both is and isn't, in the way of multiverses, and I can't get into more detail without some spoilers). Along the way, Ava and Jules must both re-evaluate their relationship, which was not so much a matter of one of them being right and the other wrong but of two flawed people whose broken edges wound up cutting each other rather than aligning. Even if they were ill-fated as lovers, could they possibly still be friends? Sometimes it takes fleeing from the dangers of a monster-filled dimension to rediscover what truly matters in life, and who matters in it.
With a certain dark humor and a sense of wonder about the possibilities of the multiverse, as well as some horror overtones now and again, Finna manages to be short enough to not overplay its premise or its characters, though even then I could find Ava trying as a main character now and again. I'm not sure I feel any need to read onward in the series, as this is a likely a gimmick with a limited shelf life.
You Might Also Enjoy:
The Warehouse (Rob Hart) - My Review
Lost in the Moment and Found (Seanan McGuire) - My Review
Time Travel Dinosaur (Matt Youngmark) - My Review
