Let's travel to Another Dimension of Us

 

I’ll be 100% real, before I saw this book on the bookshelf of that gay bookshop in Affleck’s in Manchester, I had never actually heard about it until I picked it up off the shelf and read the blurb on the inside of the dust cover. I was literally looking at the books on display and looking at which ones I hadn’t read yet, and this was one of them.

The blurb says that in 1986, Tommy Gaye is in love with his best friend, budding teen poet Renaldo Calabasas. But at the height of the AIDS crisis and amid the homophobia running rampant across America, Tommy can never share his feelings. Then one night, Renaldo is struck by lightning. And he emerges from the storm a very different boy. In 2044, Herron High student Pris Devrees jolts awake after having a strange nightmare about a boy named Tommy and a house in the neighbourhood the locals call “The Murder House.” When she ventures to the house to better understand her vivid dreams, she happens up an old self-help book that she soon realises is a guide to interdimensional travel. As bodies and minds merge across the astral plane, Pris, Tommy, and their friends race to save Renaldo from a dangerous demon, while uncovering potent realities about love, sexuality, and friendship.

Chapter one opens on Tommy, it’s very short, literally about a page long. He’s writing a poem after Renaldo has been struck by lightning and saying he’s on the astral plane and need the book. We then go to three months earlier when it’s the last day of school. Tommy has only just admitted, out loud, to himself, that he’s gay, and that the only poems he writes that are good are the ones about Renaldo. We see that Renaldo is very much a free spirit kind of person, almost alt, and is very interested in astral projecting. Honestly? Werk. And then by the end of the chapter, Tommy is forcibly taken on vacation to Ohio with his family for a few months and he has no contact with both Renaldo and his other friend, Dara. Dara, very much goth girl icon vibes, because she ends up showing Tommy this movie, The Hunger. Also, I’ve been saying chapters, this book doesn’t really go by chapter, it goes by the time the chapter is set in. Still, after Tommy ends up coming back from Ohio, Renaldo seems like a different person, he then ends up getting struck by lightning, and once he comes back to school, he’s literally a different person to Tommy and Dara.

After that we bob over to the future casually, to 2044, with Pris. I won’t spend too much time talking about this. She lives with her Uncle Myles, who has a virtual girlfriend, there was a War on Loneliness too. And Pris hangs out at a park, and this girl, Taya, turns up and gives her tips on this disk sport they play. Taya touches her and tells her to try out for the team at their school, then Pris ends up spending hours writing lines of poetry about Taya, because that was the first time she’s been touched by anyone who wasn’t her uncle or best friend, Jayde.

I will say, between Tommy and Pris, I felt like Tommy got more expansion than Pris did. I also think that the era that Tommy was in was stronger than the era Pris and Jayde were in. I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with Tommy’s being in the 80s, so all of the tech and references are already things that had been there, whereas with Pris, there was a lot of made up technology and things like that which could have benefitted from having a whole book and story to themselves, rather than being in the same one as a plotline going on in another time period alongside it, I don’t know. And in that vein, Tommy has his first chapter from his POV in the first few pages, and then it takes until page 126 to get back to him. Since the book does skip around on POVs, one of them before you get back to Tommy is one of his teachers, and all you see in that chapter is a bit about them, why they’re teaching, and then an abridged version of the events you see earlier from Tommy’s POV. But for the Tommy Pris thing, to me, it felt like Tommy was the main character, and Pris was sort of just there on the side, even though she was from a whole other time and, I think, was meant to be a main character too. I just never really felt like she was to me.

Now that I think about it, with Pris sort of just being there, that’s how I felt about a lot of the elements of this book – they were sort of just there. Like how the blurb mentions rampant homophobia and the AIDS crisis, that’s practically non-existent in the book, only coming up once or twice throughout the book. Then there’s also a section where Tommy and Pris begin astral projecting and come together as they try and save Rene that felt very Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But even then, this only happens in the second half of the book and feels very fantasy, where the first half is grounded in reality. The book felt very unfocused in what the goal was, or the aim at the end. And don’t get me wrong, the writing wasn’t bad or anything, it all just felt incredibly unfocused with so many parts that since they were all going at once, none of them really got the time of day they deserved. I think had the book focused on one feeling over the other, grounded in reality, or more sci-fi fantasy, then it would have been a lot stronger than it was, and I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

However, so that I’m not just saying negative things, I’ll mention things I liked here. Tommy. I liked him as a character, especially during his POVs and towards the beginning of the book. You could see that he was very much loser vibes. I got the feeling that he was the kind of character that never had much direction by himself, his last name was Gaye, he had horrible skin, and no friends. And then once he became friends with Renaldo, and because he ended up falling in love with Renaldo, he ended up almost finding something to go with, and he ended up liking the things Renaldo did, like poetry. And that’s how he ends up astral projecting, because Renaldo is so into it, Tommy gets into it by proxy.

Another bit I liked was towards the end, once Tommy and Pris have stopped astral projecting. So, as the two POVs are about 50/60 years apart, and the two do go to the same school, just obviously generations apart, Pris ends up finding a poem between Tommy and Renaldo. That alone I thought was cute. Now, this is going to be a minor spoiler, Pris ends up going and finding Tommy in her POV and she ends up returning the poem to him, and I just thought the reconnection between the two of them was really sweet.

Anyway, that’s it. I do always feel bad when I don’t enjoy a book. I understand that taste is just subjective, and I’ve looked at the goodreads reviews of this book, there are more positive ones than mine, and I do also understand how much work goes into writing and putting out a novel (since I’m currently in the query trenches myself) into the world. It was just a shame for me. I think this book’s biggest downfall was just its lack of focus. There are good ideas in here, I just think it didn’t focus in enough to be able to execute them as well as it could have done.

Okay, bye!