"Finna" by Nino Cipri offers a whirlwind tour through the quirks of interdimensional retail. Cipri's sharp wit and imaginative storytelling make for a tale that's as heartwarming as it is hilarious. A brilliant commentary on relationships and consumerism, this novella is both delightful and deeply thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

I have elected not to read and review this book due to time constraints. Thank you for the opportunity.

I was given access to an eARC of this title via NetGalley. This has not affected my opinion of the book and the following is an honest review.

Actual rating: 4.5 stars.

I don't know what it is about spooky fake IKEA stories, but they just really do it for me. In this one, two employees of <s>fake IKEA</s> LitenVärld, Ava (she/her) and Jules (they/them), who also happen to be ex-partners who broke up four days ago, a) discover that a customer has gone missing; b) wormholes exist and the customer has gone through one; c) LitenVärld is particularly predisposed to developing wormholes, so much so there used to be an entire division dedicated to dealing with them (now closed thanks to budget cuts) and d) as the two most junior employees, they must go to bring the customer back. Ava wasn't even supposed to be at work that day, except that she agreed to cover for a coworker who was sick.

What follows is a fraught expedition through a series of maskhåls - wormholes - a journey fraught not only because they're travelling to alternate universes, but because Ava and Jules still have a lot of relationship baggage to work through. It was great to see each of their arguments end in recalibration and character growth, to see their emotions towards each other slowly but surely move away from sadness and resentment towards something that might, possibly, be able to grow into friendship.

Of course it isn't as easy as just going into the maskhål and bringing the lost customer back, but then again: no trip to IKEA is ever that easy either. The ending is less than concrete, but it's a story about alternate universes after all, and the question at the core of the book and Ava's character arc is <i>what kind of universe is this one?</i> so I'm choosing to believe that this is the universe where this story ends, off-page, exactly the way I want it to.

The rep was great (imo) and the development satisfying, and Nino Cipri managed to capture both the unique hell of minimum-wage retail work and the uncanny liminal space that is a big box store perfectly.

I loved this novella, and though I'm slightly disappointed that the sequel isn't a continuation of Ava and Jules's story, I'm still excited to revisit this wacky, wormhole-ridden, slightly-not-right multiverse anyway. This is a story I will come back to again and again, and Nino Cipri will surely become an autobuy author for me.

Rep: Ava is a queer woman and Jules is a nonbinary person of Guianan heritage. The nonbinary rep is ownvoices.

TWs: mention of misgendering (it does not occur on-page, though Jules's manager actively avoids using any pronouns in order to not say "they."), blood, violence, clones, a brief sequence where the characters believe they are trapped in water.

This is truly a quick, speculative fiction story. What if there are multi-dimensions in an IKEA like store? What if they’re all connected and people sometimes get lost? Who goes looking for them? In <em>Finna</em>, we join Jules and Ava - who have recently broken up - as they’re delegated the task of following a lost customer through the wormhole.

I absolutely LOVED the diversity here, the neuro-divergence, the frank view of mental health, the gayness, including Jules being non-binary. None of this is swept under the rug, it’s confronted head on, including the micro-aggressions that are faced. The other part that I enjoyed is the biting indictment of capitalism and how workers are treated. It’s blunt and in your face. You’re not allowed to ignore it. As we shouldn’t. If I could have wished for one thing, it would be more length to explore Ava and Jules relationship. Just when I felt like we were getting somewhere , it ended. That’s probably the romance-reader in me.

I love this little book. It is a novella that will whisk you away to new fascinating worlds and bring you back reeling in the best way. Excellent for sci-fi lovers.

What a delightful novella! The description pretty much sums up how fun this is, but the execution is great: goofy, quirky, snarky but big-hearted.

This was a very funny, quirky novella which imagines what a trip to IKEA would be like if customers could accidentally wander off through wormholes into alternate dimensions. This is IKEA meets the multiverse.

Except it's not "IKEA" *ahem*, it's LitenVarld.

FINNA is the (now disbanded) specialist division of LitenVarld which rescues customers from the multiverse and brings them back.

Told from the point of view of Ava, one of the LitenVarld employees, it's also an hilarious - in a black comedy way - of what it's like to be a retail employee:

"LitenVarld liked its worlds small, contained in their claustrophobic cubes, and under their control. No wonder they had gotten rid of the FINNA division. Ava wondered what they had found out there; what they'd brought back, what ideas they'd been infected with. Maybe some teams had chosen not to come back at all."

When a customer goes missing through a wormhole into an alternate dimension, Jules and Ava must read up on the FINNA manual - and fast - to try to rescue her. The dimensions they travel through on their quest are simultaneously bizarre, mundane and very dangerous.

Oh, and a small thing - we really need a gender-neutral pronoun. One of the charatcters, Jules, is neither 'he' nor 'she' but 'they'. To start with it was a little jarring, but I got used to it after a while and it simply served to highlight the limitations of the English language. The more we read gender neutral language, the easier it will become.

Imagine you work in a Swedish big box furniture store (no not that one) and one day an elderly woman goes missing. Supposedly she slipped through a portal into another dimension. What do you do? A) Ignore it. It’s not your problem or B) Team up with your ex-partner to track her across a multitude of universes?
Ava and Jules have to do exactly that. After breaking up not so long ago and trying to avoid each other they are forced to work together in an attempt to bring back an elderly woman. Together they have to face carnivorous furniture, a swarm of furniture salespeople, and the building resentment between them.

FINNA is only about 100 pages long but is packed with action and lots of fun. Despite its wonderful humour it also manages to tackle topics like capitalism, sexuality and gender identity.

Ava has just broken up with Jules so she’s not feeling very happy when she has to cover for a co-worker during a shift when she might see Jules. Her mood gets even worse when she discovers both have been assigned to save an old lady who has got lost in the furniture store and possibly gone through a portal to another dimension.

This was a short but fun book. The characters were interesting and the story was great. It was the first book I read by Nino Cipri and I will surely read more.

If you like when science fiction merges with our reality, give this one a try.

Such a fun little novella about a Swedish furniture big-box store with a slight wormhole problem. After an elderly customer goes missing, the two newest employees--and recent exes--are tasked with jumping dimensions to track her down. Let's just say it's way above their minimum wage pay grade.

This was honestly such a cute, clever, interesting book. It's quirky in all the best ways. I mean, it's basically an interdimensional Ikea? So good. Reminded me a bit of one particular episode of Legends of Tomorrow, which probably tells you just how wonderfully weird this book is if you're at all familiar with the show.

Trust me, just read it.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility! Fellow trans friends, remember that you are visible today. No crimes allowed until we go back to being under the radar.

*crowd boos*

Yeah, you never know how the joke’s gonna land.

Anyways, it’s a strange day. Not a lot of people recognize it – those that do are either hip-deep in the trans community and have no qualms about sharing their support, and then there are others that don’t dare say anything because it’s as good as a banner to out them to those they might not be out to yet. And with our society going to hell in a handbasket lately, people are more lonely and isolated than ever.

But I’m here to remind you that you’re here, and I see you. And you, hopefully, see me.

This week’s book is FINNA by Nino Cipri.

When an elderly customer at a big box furniture store slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but our two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.

Can friendship blossom from the ashes of a relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.

Ava and Jules are compelling characters – Ava is dynamic and ready to throw down at a moment’s notice, Jules is compassionate and down-to-earth as well as being the Non-Binary Character Of My Dreams – who drive a story rife with answers to the question, “What do you do when you’re lost?”

Ava and Jules both have different answers to this, which are fundamentally tied to who they are as people. Ava is very action-oriented, and isn’t afraid to dive head-first into anything. Jules, on the other hand, has a very ‘go with the flow’ attitude, and has to journey through the entire story in order to finally get the verve to stand up and say, “I’m taking action.” Which is great growth, and even though it’s left us in this Schrodinger’s Cat situation with Jules, it still breaks that weird too-cool vibe that most people think non-binary folks have.

It connected with me, really. As a person who is also non-binary, it’s hard to stand up and say that you deny any and all pre-made social classifications. You’re not cis, but you’re also not trans in a way that the modern public mass might understand. And it’s even harder if you’re not a white androgynous-looking person. So you make yourself exude the cool-kid vibe, you prod about your pronouns but on God will you actually get into a fight over it, and the only action you can ever really take is predetermined by what people are expecting of you.

Or maybe it’s just me. I, too, wish I could escape to another dimension where I get to live on a submarine and have people respect my pronouns. What a lovely thought, yeah?

So tl;dr: FINNA was excellent, the character balance drove the story in a way that few stories can ever be driven, and the background of the weird off-kilter IKEA is absolutely to die for.

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This is a me-not-you dnf, mostly because it was more humorous than I was expecting (though I should have known!), which I just wasn't quite in the mood for.

When a shopper's grandmother accidentally gets lost inside a wormhole that opens up inside of their furniture store, ex-partners Jules and Ava are sent into the abyss to bring her back.

In Finna, Cipri perfectly captures the soul-sucking turdfest that is corporate retail while also giving us the all the feels - because c'mon, who hasn't been stuck working a shit ass job that you hate but can't afford to leave while also attempting to avoid your ex, who also works there? Right?

It's the perfect balance of sci-fi meets queer love story and, while it's not quite as stunning as his collection Homesick, if you're looking for something light and engaging you'd do well to grab yourself a copy.

I’ve always believed that Ikea stores and shopping mall parking lots were designed on the “Hotel California” principle. As in “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

There’s something simultaneously comforting and horrifying about the maze-like sameness of Ikea stores, or in this case, their lookalike LitenVärld ™ stores. It doesn’t seem all that far-fetched to believe that those features which make it so easy to get lost inside the store would also make it much too easy for one store to bleed into another that is almost-but-not-quite the same.

At that point, a wormhole between the multiverse of oh-so-similar stores doesn’t seem all that far out of the realms of possibility. And that seems like the place where the idea behind Finna was born. Inside one of the faux-apartment layouts at Ikea – the ones you wouldn’t want to live in even in extremis. Like Edgelord Rockabilly Dorm Room, Pastel Goth Hideaway and Nihilist Bachelor Cube..

(Seriously, the names that Ava has come up with for the various stage-set arrangements are pure gold, hilarious, mocking and much too true all at the same time. Next time I’m in Ikea I’m going to be looking for all of them and trying to make up more!)

While it seems like Ava is making the best of this ultimately dead end job, her descriptions of work life and working conditions in this minimum wage corporate box let the reader feel just how soul-killing the place is. And that’s before Ava’s day descends into the worst of all possible worlds.

She has to work her shift with her ex. Her literally just-broken-up-with ex. The wounds from their breakup aren’t just still raw, they’re still bleeding.

And then a customer’s grandmother gets lost in a wormhole. Grandma Ursula has wandered into the multiverse, and it’s up to the two employees with the least seniority – of course that’s Ava and her ex – to take the FINNA device into who-knows-where and face who-knows-what in order to get her back.

Hell just got even more hellish – and so are some of those alternate LitenVärld ™ stores. The one where they discover that the Venus-flytrap chairs ate Grandma isn’t nearly the worst.

The clone swarms are the worst. Definitely the worst – and the most persistent. But they also allow Ava and Jules to find the next-best match to their search through the multiverse. And possibly to the best match for their own futures, whether separately, together or somewhere in-between.

Escape Rating A-: Part of what allows this story to work so well, and to feel so complete, at its relatively short length is the setting. We all know that this is Ikea, we all know what Ikea stores are like, and we all have opinions about their layout, their furniture and their culture. We’ve probably also all eaten the Swedish meatballs.

So the opening setting for the story doesn’t need to be described in any depth. We’ve all been there. Probably multiple times. And probably still have the furniture to prove it. In my case it’s at least a dozen Billy bookcases – with those terrible hex screwdrivers and extra bolts in random drawers all over the house. Still.

The familiarity of that setting allows us to get inside Ava’s head quickly and makes it easy for us to see what she sees because we’ve already been there. And that’s when the story really takes off for the multiverse.

A part of me wants to call this a coming-of-age story, but it isn’t really. Both Jules and Ava are adults. Except that adulting is what they are struggling with. Their jobs are soul destroying and yet they are trapped in this life and can’t see a way out. Being an adult means being responsible for yourself, and that’s something they’re both ultra-aware of and equally aware that they are failing at – or at least they feel that way.

That’s where their romantic relationship fell apart. Ava is anxious about everything and Jules needs to fix everything. Their clashing neuroses drove them apart as Jules wanted to fix what was wrong with Ava – making her feel even more broken and incapable – while Ava worried about everything Jules did that created chaos – which was often.

Their strange journey forces them to get past what happened and work together – even as Jules’ penchant for chaos creates even more of the stuff. At the same time, it’s Jules’ wanderlust and desire to see what’s over the next horizon – or through the next wormhole – that keeps them moving forward. And in a situation where ALL of Ava’s anxieties have literally been made manifest, her very real worries allow her to let her self-created worries slip to the background.

In working together they discover that they still mean something to each other – just not necessarily what their all-consuming, über-fast slide into romance thought that might be, or ought to be.

In the end, they manage to reach out for a future that might include each other, or it might not. It’s Schrödinger’s relationship, with all of the possibilities still there in the box. All possibilities exist simultaneously – they just have to pick one.

Just not the one with the swarm of bloodthirsty clones.

Finna was such a fun story to live in. There was basically an Ikea with wormholes in it, and someone's grandma disappeared. Obviously the employees needed to go track her down.

It took me a little bit to connect to the writing in this one so I was a bit disconnected from the story at first. That said, everything did eventually fall into place, and I no longer had trouble with the writing at all.

This was my first book to read by Cipri. I loved their imagination and their characters. I would love to read more from them in the future. Being a novella, Finna is the perfect size for an afternoon (or two) of "multi-dimensional swashbuckling".

Finna is the story of an elderly woman getting lost in another dimension when a wormhole opens up in a definitely-not-IKEA big box furniture store. I know, I can already imagine what you’re thinking: “I thought this was a speculative fiction blog. This just sounds like a regular trip to IKEA!”

The suspension of disbelief isn’t really the point in this delightful novella. Nino Cipri expertly blends the mundane with the surreal, introducing us to a fascinating multiverse through the eyes of two minimum-wage retail workers who recently broke up with each other.

I love when broken people learn to be less broken together, even if the journey is rocky. The complicated relationship between Jules and Ava was wonderful to read. Their interactions and growth throughout the novella were the glue that held the story together.

Finna grabbed my attention completely when, after a mysterious wormhole into another dimension swallows up a customer, the reaction from the store manager is “Ugh not again, time to make everyone watch the wormhole safety video again.” It wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was exactly what I wanted.

The story that follows delivers equal parts weird adventure, snarky banter, and emotional moments that hit close to home. I often enjoy reading an author’s take on some of life’s many unanswerable questions. Instead of providing answers, Finna simply offers the assurance that the answer exists. It’s just on us to find it.

Jules and Ava were lovely characters, and I only wish there were more pages to explore their relationship. This was my first experience with Cipri’s work, and based on the strength of Finna, I’m excited to see what they write next.

Ava and Jules work at a giant, home furnishings store, and they hate it. Worse, they broke up a week ago and Ava has been avoiding Jules ever since. When an elderly customer goes missing, they’ll have to team up and travel through several dimensions of “murderous clones and carnivorous chairs” to bring her back to their home world.

There are so many things I loved about this weird little beauty. I’m a huge fan of the multiverse and am always impressed with the worldbuilding it takes for an author to tackle such a setting. In this slim volume, we only see a few possibilities, but I can 100% see this becoming a Wayward Children situation where Ava and Jules’ travel through all sorts of dimensions and have all kinds of adventures while trying to repair their fractured relationship.

I also love the unusual way the relationship lies at the center of the story. It’s definitely not a break up and make up story, it’s deeper than that. Ava and Jules are trying to find their way back to each other, almost as if they can restitch themselves into something new. It’s never about being romantically linked again, but about learning from the flaws that doomed their relationship in the first place and buildings something else, perhaps something stronger.

I devoured this in just under two hours. so it’s not a huge time sink if you’re looking for some adventure on a rainy afternoon on the couch. It’s out today, and if you like queer, nb characters traveling through space and time, check it out. I’m really glad I did!

Enjoyable but insubstantial novella about queer exes on a rescue mission after an inter-dimensional portal opens in their Ikea-like workplace. I really liked the set up here but the middle of the book felt too slight and undeveloped for me to really get invested in it. The author's note says that Finna was originally written as a TV screenplay and while the novella format works, it does really feel like it would be more suited to TV. A fun, quick read but I didn't love it as much as the author's previous short story collection.

I love portal/multiverse stories, so I was eagerly looking forward to this book, although I didn't know quite what to expect, as I had never read this author before, and sometimes authors don't use the full freedom of this trope to expand the story to what it could be, but Cipri does a fine job, and I'm looking forward to any other stories they will write.

I loved this story. It had just the right amount of chills, humor, adventure, and pathos to make it a very fun read. The two lead characters are a couple of down on their luck, store employees, who discover that one of the store's customers has accidentally wandered into the multiverse. The two of them take it upon themselves, (even though they are suffering through a bad breakup), to hunt down and rescue the wayward old lady.

The best portal stories wander in unexpected directions, and that was my favorite part. Its not possible to predict where the story will end, or if the characters will even survive to the end. What's interesting is that the plot is really just a background for the self actualization of the narrator. I didn't like her very much at first but grew to like her more during the story, and the ending, while not a happy one, is warm and touching.

10/10 would recommend this story to SciFi/Fantasy fans.

This book is conceptually brilliant and, despite a whole lot of weird, rooted in the totally relatable and perfectly mundane: what would you do for a job you hate but need and what would you do for the ex you don't think you'll ever get over? But (more importantly) where would a wormhole in IKEA take you?

Ava and Jules were such realistic characters and their personalities, histories (both individual and shared), and reactions were both believable and insightful. Plus - trans/nonbinary rep is always an amazing addition.

It got a little bit too weird near the end with the hive but snapped back (like a closing wormhole - ha) to shape almost immediately. Plus the ending gives the reader a sense of continuing adventure without a lack of conclusion. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this author in the future!